Page:How to Keep Bees.djvu/82

54 his shoulder. If she has to carry it from the bottom of the honey-box she takes it in a way I cannot explain better than to say she slips it under her chin; when thus equipped you would never know she was encumbered with anything, unless it chanced to slip out, when she will dexterously tuck it back with one of her forefeet.

Honey-comb has been the delight of mathematicians from the earliest ages. The plan on which it is built, if perfectly carried out, would be the incarnate perfection of strength and space for holding fluid contents. This fact so delighted the earlier mathematicians that they set to measuring the angles of the cells and their pyramidal bases, with truly wonderful results. But with the later methods of exact measurement it has been demonstrated that the cells are rarely perfect in construction; and that the angles, as well as the faces of the rhombs on which they are built, vary. Because of this there have been developed doubters and pessimists who declare that honey-comb is the result of chance; and that cells, crowded together, must, from the nature of things, become six-sided; and that bees are not mathematically wise. With this conclusion we do not agree in the least, although we admit that the fortuitously six-sided cell may have been a step in the education of the bee-artisans. But we would ask the pessimists to explain why, if all is chance, the bees build so perfectly the central part of the comb which forms the bases of the cells. This central part is built first and is fashioned of rhombs, which are made into alternating three-sided pyramids. Who dare assert that reasonably perfect, alternating