"How doth the little busy bee, improve each shining hour!"
The poet might with equal truth have described her, as improving the gloomy days, and the dark nights, in her useful labors.
It is an interesting fact, which I do not remember ever to have seen particularly noticed by any writer, that honey gathering, and comb building, go on simultaneously; so that when one stops, the other ceases also. I have repeatedly observed, that as soon as the honey harvest fails, the bees intermit their labors in building new comb, even when large portions of their hive are unfilled. They might enlarge their combs by using some of their stores; but then they would incur the risk of perishing in the winter, by starvation. When honey no longer abounds in the fields, it is wisely ordered, that they should not consume their hoarded treasures, in expectation of further supplies, which may never come. I do not believe, that any other safe rule could have been given them; and if honey gathering was our business, with all our boasted reason, we should be obliged to adopt the very same course.
Wax is one of the best non-conductors of heat, so that when it is warmed by the animal heat of the bees, it can more easily be worked, than if it parted with its heat too readily. By this property, the combs serve also to keep the bees warm, and there is not so much risk of the honey candying in the cells, or the combs cracking with frost. If wax was a good conductor of heat, the combs would often be icy cold, moisture would condense and freeze upon them, and they would fail to answer the ends for which they are intended.
The size of the cells, in which workers are reared, never varies: the same may substantially be said of the drone cells which are very considerably larger; the cells in which honey is stored, often vary exceedingly in depth, while in diameter, they are of all sizes from that of the worker cells to that of the drones.
The cells of the bees are found perfectly to answer all the most refined conditions of a very intricate mathematical problem! Let it be required to find what shape a given quantity of matter must take, in order to have the greatest capacity, and the greatest strength, requiring at the same time, the least space, and the least labor in its construction. This problem has been solved by the most refined processes of the higher mathematics, and the result is the hexagonal or six-sided cell of the honey bee, with its three four-sided figures at the base!
The shape of these figures cannot be altered, ever so little, except for the worse. Besides possessing the desirable qualities already described, they answer as nurseries for the rearing of the young, and as small air-tight vessels in which the honey is preserved from souring or candying. Every prudent housewife who puts up her preserves in tumblers, or small glass jars, and carefully pastes them over, to keep out the air, will understand the value of such an arrangement.
"There are only three possible figures of the cells," says Dr. Reid, "which can make them all equal and similar, without any useless spaces between them. These are the equilateral triangle, the square and the regular hexagon. It is well known to mathematicians that there is not a fourth way possible, in which a plane may be cut into little spaces that shall be equal, similar and regular, without leaving any interstices."
An equilateral triangle would have made an uncomfortable tenement for an insect with a round body; and a square would not have been much better. At first sight a circle would seem to be the best shape for the development of the larvæ: but such a figure would have caused a needless sacrifice of space, materials and strength; while the honey which now adheres so admirably to the many angles or corners of the six-sided cell, would have been much more liable to run out! I will venture to assign a new reason for the hexagonal form. The body of the immature insect as it undergoes its changes, is charged with a super-abundance of moisture which passes off through the reticulated cover which the bees build over its cell: a hexagon while it approaches so nearly the shape of a circle as not to incommode the young bee, furnishes in its six corners the necessary vacancies for its more thorough ventilation!
So invariably uniform in size, as well as perfect in other respects, are the cells in which the workers are bred, that some mathematicians have proposed their adoption, as the best unit for measures of capacity to serve for universal use.