rim or wall of wax round a growing comb, flexures may sometimes be observed, corresponding in position to the planes of the rhombic basal plates of future cells.  But the rough wall of wax has in every case to be finished off, by being largely gnawed away on both sides.  The manner in which the bees build is curious; they always make the first rough wall from ten to twenty times thicker than 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, 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 entirely pull down and rebuild in different ways the same cell, sometimes recurring to a shape which they had at first rejected.