Page:Jardine Naturalist's library Bees.djvu/116

112 the direction of their combs, when I approximated a surface too smooth to admit of their clustering on it. They always sought the wooden sides. I thus compelled them to curve the combs in the strangest shapes, by placing a pane of glass at a certain distance from their edges. These results indicate a degree of instinct truly wonderful. They denote even more than instinct; for glass is not a substance against which bees can be warned by nature. In trees, their natural abode, there is nothing that resembles it, or with the same polish. The most singular part of their proceeding is changing the direction of the work, before arriving at the surface of the glass, and while yet at a distance suitable for doing so. Do they anticipate the inconvenience which would attend any other mode of building? No less curious is the plan adopted by the bees for producing an angle in the combs; the wonted fashion of the work, and the dimensions of the cells, must be altered. Therefore, the cells on the upper or convex side of the comb are enlarged; they are constructed of three or four times the width of those on the opposite surface. How can so many insects, occupied at once on the edges of the combs, concur in giving them a common curvature from one extremity to the other? How do they resolve on establishing cells so small on one side, while dimensions so enlarged are bestowed on those of the other? And is it not still more singular that they have the art of making a correspondence between cells of such reciprocal discrepance? The bottom being common to both, the tubes alone assume a taper form.