The bees, however, did not suffer this to
happen, and they stopped their excavations in due time; so that the
basins, as soon as they had been a little deepened, came to have flat
bottoms; and these flat bottoms, formed by thin little plates of the
vermilion wax having been left ungnawed, were situated, as far as the
eye could judge, exactly along the planes of imaginary intersection
between the basins on the opposite sides of the ridge of wax. In
parts, only little bits, in other parts, large portions of a rhombic
plate had been left between the opposed basins, but the work, from the
unnatural state of things, had not been neatly performed. The bees
must have worked at very nearly the same rate on the opposite sides of
the ridge of vermilion wax, as they circularly gnawed away and
deepened the basins on both sides, in order to have succeeded in thus
leaving flat plates between the basins, by stopping work along the
intermediate planes or planes of intersection.
Considering how flexible thin wax is, I do not see that there is any
difficulty in the bees, whilst at work on the two sides of a strip of
wax, perceiving when they have gnawed the wax away to the proper
thinness, and then stopping their work. In ordinary combs it has
appeared to me that the bees do not always succeed in working at
exactly the same rate from the opposite sides; for I have noticed
half-completed rhombs at the base of a just-commenced cell, which were
slightly concave on one side, where I suppose that the bees had
excavated too quickly, and convex on the opposed side, where the bees
had worked less quickly.
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