It is here that she shines in her most significant light. The complicated structures with which she fills the bee-city do not call for unwearying toil alone: they could never have been fashioned unless the combined arts of engineer, architect, and mathematician had been brought to bear on them. Nor are they merely simple constructive and mathematical problems which the honey-bee is called upon to face; nor, though difficult, unvarying, and so amenable to instinctive solution. In almost every comb built we see special and necessarily unforeseen difficulties met and triumphantly overcome. In the construction of the six-sided cell, with its base composed of three rhombs or diamonds, the bee has adopted a form which our greatest arithmeticians admit to be the best possible for her requirements, and she endeavours to keep to this form wherever practicable. But it constantly happens, in her work of comb-building, that local conditions interfere with her plans; and then she will make five-sided cells, or square cells, or triangular, or any other form, just as the need impels her. It is a facile, comfortably finite thing to put all this down to a mysterious essence called instinct, with which the organism of the bee has been divinely dosed, as men serve electricity to a Leyden jar. But it was not instinct that made Wren put the steel cable round the dome of St. Paul’s, nor instinct that lifted the crown-stones to the top of the Great Pyramids. These are works of a creature more highly equipped and instigated; yet their supremacy is all of a piece with the honey-comb, which is made of a material fragile, light as air, but which, by the art of the bee, becomes capable not only of supporting, but of suspending a weight thirty times as great as its own.