The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th EditionDarwin, Charles
History
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition
Darwin, Charles
Evolution (Biology); Natural selection
When bees have a place on which they can stand in their proper
positions for working—for instance, on a slip of wood, placed directly
under the middle of a comb growing downwards, so that the comb has to
be built over one face of the slip—in this case the bees can lay the
foundations of one wall of a new hexagon, in its strictly proper place,
projecting beyond the other completed cells. It suffices that the bees
should be enabled to stand at their proper relative distances from each
other and from the walls of the last completed cells, and then, by
striking imaginary spheres, they can build up a wall intermediate
between two adjoining spheres; but, as far as I have seen, they never
gnaw away and finish off the angles of a cell till a large part both of
that cell and of the adjoining cells has been built. This capacity in
bees of laying down under certain circumstances a rough wall in its
proper place between two just-commenced cells, is important, as it
bears on a fact, which seems at first subversive of the foregoing
theory; namely, that the cells on the extreme margin of wasp-combs are
sometimes strictly hexagonal; but I have not space here to enter on
this subject. Nor does there seem to me any great difficulty in a
single insect (as in the case of a queen-wasp) making hexagonal cells,
if she were to work alternately on the inside and outside of two or
three cells commenced at the same time, always standing at the proper
relative distance from the parts of the cells just begun, sweeping
spheres or cylinders, and building up intermediate planes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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