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. In one well-marked instance, I put the comb
back into the hive, and allowed the bees to go on working for a short
time, and again examined the cell, and I found that the rhombic plate
had been completed, and had become _perfectly flat:_ it was absolutely
impossible, from the extreme thinness of the little rhombic plate, that
they could have effected
this by gnawing away the convex side; and I suspect that the bees in
such cases stand in the opposed cells and push and bend the ductile and
warm wax (which as I have tried is easily done) into its proper
intermediate plane, and thus flatten it.
From the experiment of the ridge of vermilion wax, we can clearly see
that if the bees were to build for themselves a thin wall of wax, they
could make their cells of the proper shape, by standing at the proper
distance from each other, by excavating at the same rate, and by
endeavouring to make equal spherical hollows, but never allowing the
spheres to break into each other. Now bees, as may be clearly seen by
examining the edge of a growing comb, do make a rough, circumferential
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