In order to satisfy myself that hexagonal architecture truly was written in the spirit of the bee, I cut off and removed one day a disc of the size of a five-franc piece from the centre of a comb, at a spot where there were both brood-cells and cells full of honey.  I cut into the circumference of this disc, at the intersecting point of the pyramidal cells; inserted a piece of tin on the base of one of these sections, shaped exactly to its dimensions, and possessed of resistance sufficient to prevent the bees from bending or twisting it.  Then I replaced the slice of comb, duly furnished with its slab of tin, on the spot whence I had removed it; so that, while one side of the comb presented no abnormal feature, the damage having been repaired, the other displayed a sort of deep cavity, covering the space of about thirty cells, with the piece of tin as its base.  The bees were disconcerted at first; they flocked in numbers to inspect and examine this curious chasm; day after day they wandered agitatedly to and fro, apparently unable to form a decision.  But, as I fed them copiously every evening, there came a moment when they had no more cells available for the storage of provisions.  Thereupon they probably summoned their great engineers, distinguished sculptors, and wax-workers, and invited them to turn this useless cavity to profitable account.

The wax-makers having gathered around and formed themselves into a dense festoon, so that the necessary heat might be maintained, other bees descended into the hole and proceeded solidly to attach the metal, and connect it with the walls of adjacent cells, by means of little waxen hooks which they distributed regularly over its surface.  In the upper semicircle of the disc they then began to construct three or four cells, uniting these to the hooks.  Each of these transition, or accommodation, cells was more or less deformed at the top, to allow of its being soldered to the adjoining cell on the comb; but its lower portion already designed on the tin three very clear angles, whence there ran three little straight lines that correctly indicated the first half of the following cell.

After forty-eight hours, and notwithstanding the fact that only three bees at a time were able to work in the cavity, the entire surface of the tin was covered with outlined cells.  These were less regular, certainly, than those of an ordinary comb; wherefore the queen, having inspected them, wisely declined to lay any eggs there, for the generation that would have arisen therefrom would necessarily have been deformed.  Each cell, however, was a perfect hexagon; nor did it contain a single crooked line, a single curved figure or angle.  And yet the ordinary conditions had all been changed; the cells had neither been scooped out of a block, according to Huber’s description, nor had they been designed within a waxen hood, and, from being circular at first, been subsequently converted into hexagons by the pressure of adjoining