| → succeeded in thus 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| thus succeeded in 1869 1872 |
|
| → in the opposed cells 1859 1860 1861 1866 |
| on opposite sides 1869 1872 |
|
|
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 plate had been completed, and had become
perfectly
it was absolutely impossible, from the extreme thinness of the little
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
we can
see
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
|
