n the
excessively thin finished wall of the cell, which will ultimately be left.
We shall understand how they work, by supposing masons first to pile up a
broad ridge of cement, and then to begin cutting it away equally on both
sides near the ground, till a smooth, very thin wall is left in the middle;
the masons always piling up the cut-away cement, and adding fresh cement,
on the summit of the ridge. We shall thus have a thin wall steadily growing
upward; but always crowned by a gigantic coping. From all the cells, both
those just commenced and those completed, being thus crowned by a strong
coping of wax, the bees can cluster and crawl over the comb without
injuring the delicate hexagonal walls, which are only about one
four-hundredth of an inch in thickness; the plates of the pyramidal basis
being about twice as thick. By this singular manner of building, strength
is continually given to the comb, with the utmost ultimate economy of wax.

It seems at first to add to the difficulty of understanding how the cells
are made, that a multitude of bees all work together; one bee after working
a short time at one cell going to another, so that, as Huber has stated,
{232} a score of individuals work even at the commencement of the first
cell. I was able practically to show this fact, by covering the edges of
the hexagonal walls of a single cell, or the extreme margin of the
circumferential rim of a growing comb, with an extremely thin layer of
melted vermilion wax; and I invariably found that the colour was most
delicately diffused by the bees--as delicately as a painter could have done
with his brush--by atoms of the coloured wax having been taken from the
spot on which it had been placed, and worked into the growing edges of the
cells all round. The work of construction seems to be a sort of balance
struck between many bees, all instinctively standing at the same relative
distance from each other, all trying to sweep equal spheres, and then
building up, or leaving ungnawed, the planes of intersection between these
spheres. It was really curious to note in cases of difficulty, as when two
pieces of comb met at an angle, how often the bees would pull down and
rebuild in different ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape
which they had at first rejected.

When bees have a place on which they can stand in their proper positions
for working,--for instance, on a slip of wood, placed directly under the
middle of a comb