- Дата: 29-09-2024, 11:55
It seems at first to add to the difficulty of understanding how the cells are made, that a mess of bees all work together; one bee after working a short while at one cell going to a different, in order that, as Huber has acknowledged, a rating of individuals work even at the commencement of the first cell. It was most fascinating to me to observe that wherever several bees had begun to excavate these basins close to collectively, they had begun their work at such a distance from one another, that by the time the basins had acquired the above stated width (i.e. about the width of an peculiar cell), and had been in depth about one sixth of the diameter of the sphere of which they formed an element, the rims of the basins intersected or broke into each other. As quickly as this occurred, the bees ceased to excavate, and started to build up flat walls of wax on the traces of intersection between the basins, so that each hexagonal prism was built upon the festooned edge of a smooth basin, as a substitute of on the straight edges of a three-sided pyramid as in the case of unusual cells. The bees, however, did not suffer this to occur, and so they stopped their excavations in due time; in order that the basins, as soon as they had been slightly deepened, got here to have flat bottoms; and these flat bottoms, formed by skinny little plates of the vermilion wax having been left ungnawed, have been situated, as far as the eye may choose, exactly along the planes of imaginary intersection between the basins on the other sides of the ridge of wax.