"Oh, large enough to put my forefinger in, and sometimes fifteen inches long. After she has bored it as deep as is necessary, she begins to divide it into separate cells. So she commences at the bottom, and puts in a quantity of what is called bee-bread, until it reaches about an inch in height; on the top of this she lays an egg, and the bread is put there to feed the young one as soon as it comes out of the egg. She then makes a floor over it out of the dust, as I told you; she knows how to glue this dust together, and she brings it grain by grain from the heap in which she put it when she first brought it out: and she always begins by gluing the dust around the outside of the hole she has bored, and then glues another ring to that, and then another, and another, making each ring smaller and smaller, until she has it all filled; so that her floor, when it is done, appears like a parcel of rings of smaller and smaller sizes placed within each other. On the top of this floor she puts bee-bread, as before, and places another egg on it, and then covers it with a floor again; and so she goes on making cells and filling them with bread, and covering each with a floor, until she has filled up the hole." "Uncle Philip, how do the young bees get out when the egg is hatched? It seems as if they were shut up for ever in prison." "No, boys; there is a way for them to get out, and it shows the wonderful wisdom of God in teaching this poor bee how to contrive the matter. The egg which is put in the lowest cell being the oldest, the little worm that is afterward to be a bee will come out of that one first: now, you know, he never could get through all the cells over his head, filled as they are with bee-bread, so as to come out at the top of the hole. If he gets out at all, then, it must be at the bottom. The old bee knows this, and she so arranges these eggs that when the worm comes out it will be with his head pointed downwards; he falls to eating his bread, and so eats himself down to the bottom of his cell, and there he finds that his mother has bored a hole from his cell to the outside, and through that he comes out. When his brother in the cell above him has eaten his way down to the bottom of his cell, he just eats through the floor and gets into the cell below, which is then empty, you know, and walks out at the same hole which his older brother used before him. And so all the rest one after another eat their way downwards into the empty cells below them, and get out at the same back-door, which their mother made by what we call her _instinct_, which just means the share of wisdom which God gives to the lower animals to show them how to take care of themselves."