| → flat bottoms; 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| bottoms with flat sides; 1869 |
| flat bases; 1872 |
|
| → parts, only little bits, 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| some parts, only small portions, 1869 1872 |
|
| → on the opposite 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| in circularly gnawing away and deepening the basins on both 1869 1872 |
|
| → as they circularly gnawed away and deepened the basins on both sides, 1859 1860 1866 |
| as they circularly gnawed away and deep- ened the basins on both sides, 1861 |
| OMIT 1869 1872 |
|
| → succeeded in thus 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| thus succeeded in 1869 1872 |
|
|
would have broken into each other from the opposite sides. The bees, however, did not suffer this to happen, and they stopped their excavations in due time; so that the basins, as soon as they had been a little deepened, came to have
→flat bottoms;
and these flat
formed by
plates of the vermilion wax
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
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
the
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
where the bees had worked less quickly. In one
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
|
