* not satisfied with thus unloading her burden: she enters into the cell, head first, spreads the two pellets, kneads them, and deposits upon them a little saccharine matter. If the labor which she has executed in gathering this harvest has fatigued her too much, another bee comes along and kneads the pellets and spreads them; for all the Helots of this little Sparta are equally aware of all that needs to be done in each particular case, and acquit themselves equally well of it. But it does not always happen that the bee has only to dip into the blossoms to gather this dust with her fecee; there are circumstances when the harvest is not so easy, and requires some dexterity on the part of the worker. Before its full ripeness, the dust is enclosed in capsules which botanists have named "the apex of the stamen." The worker which seeks pollen, from still closed capsules, is compelled to open those capsules and she does so with her mandibles, then she seizes the pollen grains with her first pair of legs: the articulations of the end of these legs act like hands; the grains are then passed to the second pair of legs which, after depositing them within the baskets of the third pair, tamp them down by striking them several times; the slight moisture of the grains helps to hold them there also and to pack them together; the worker repeats the same maneuvers, completing the filling of the two baskets, and hastens to the hive with her plunder. "This dust which the bees gather from the flowers, is not the same as the wax which they mold with so much industry, it is only the raw material, and this material requires a preparation and digestion in a particular stomach, in a second stomach. It is there that it becomes true beeswax; the bees then disgorge it through their mouth, in the shape of a pap or white foam, which hardens quickly in the air: while this dough is yet ductile, it assumes easily any shape which the bee may desire to give it, it is for her the same as clay for the potter. "A great physicist, who studied deeply the geometric work of bees, thought that he could reduce it to its actual value by considering it as the simple result of a coarse mechanism; he thought that bees, crowded against one another, naturally gave wax a hexagonal figure, and that it was with the bees' cells as with any balls of soft material which, pressed against each other, would assume the shape of dice. I am thankful to this physicist for his aloofness from the allurements of the marvelous; I should like to praise him upon the correctness of his comparison, but we will show that the work of bees is far from the simplicity of mechanism that he was pleased to imagine. "The reader has not forgotten that the cells of bees are not simple hexagon tubes, these tubes have a pyramidal base, formed of 3 pieces in losanges, or 3 rhombs, and it is with these that they form the foundation of the cells: on two outside faces of this rhomb they erect two of the walls of the cell; then they shape a second rhomb which they fasten to the first, giving them the proper slope; on those exterior walls they erect two new walls of the hexagon; lastly they build the third rhomb and the two last walls: all this work is at first rather massive but must not remain thus. The skilled workers perfect it, thin it down, polish it, straighten it; their jaws serve them as planes and files. A really fleshy tongue, fastened at the base of the jaws, also helps the work of the teeth. Many workers succeed each other in this labor; that which one has only sketched another finishes a little farther, a third perfects it, &c., and although it has thus gone through so many hands, it appears as if made in a mold.