Now there hangs from the top of the vault a small block of wax which is yet without form.  As soon as it appears to be thick enough there comes out of the group another bee bearing an entirely different aspect from that of those which have preceded it.  One may well believe on seeing the certainty, the determination, with which he goes about his work and the manner in which those who stand round about him look on, that he is an expert engineer who has come to construct in space the place which the first cell shall occupy, the cell from which must mathematically depend everything which is afterwards constructed.  Whatever he may be, this bee belongs to a class of the sculpturing, of chisel working bees who produce no wax and whose function seems to be to employ the materials with which the others furnish them.  This bee then chooses the place of the first cell.  She digs for a moment in the block of wax which has already been placed in position, and builds up the side of the cell with the wax that she picks from the cavity.  Then in exactly the same way as her predecessors have done, she suddenly leaves the work she has designed; another impatient worker replaces her and carries it on another step, which is finished by a third one.  In the meantime others are working round about her according to the same method of division of labor until the outer sides of each wall is finished.

It would almost seem that an essential law of the hive was that every worker should take a pride in its work, and that all the work should be done in common, and so to speak, unanimously, in order that the fraternal spirit should not be disturbed by a sense of jealousy.

Very soon the outline of the comb may be seen.  In form it is still lenticular, for the little prismatic tubes of which it is composed are unequally prolonged, and they diminish as they get away from the centre towards the extremities.  At this moment it might be compared, both in form and in thickness, to a human tongue hanging down from two of the sides of the hexagonal cells which are placed back to back.

As soon as the first cells are constructed, the workers add a roof to the second and so on to the third and to the fourth.  These sets of cells are divided by irregular intervals, and they are calculated in such a manner that when they are made to receive their full complement, the bees always have room enough to move about between the parallel walls of the honeycombs.

It follows then that in making their original plan the different thicknesses of every honeycomb must be fixed upon, and at the same time the alley-ways which separate each must be different in turn, and this width must be twice the height of a bee since they have to pass each other between the upright combs.

But even the bees are not infallible, and they do not always work with exact mechanical certainty.  When they find themselves in a difficult place they sometimes make very great blunders.  One often finds that they leave too much, and often too little, space between the honeycombs, and they remedy these faults as well as they can—­sometimes in finishing the comb which is too near another in an oblique line, or sometimes when they have left too much space they interpose a smaller comb between it.