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, 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.
Pages:
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286