It rose perpendicularly above it and differed only by its position from those that we had seen before. It was a minute, straight and vertical wall, five or six lines in length, two lines in height and half a line thick (Pl. VIIB, fig. 1 & 2). Its edge was arched and its surface rough; it appeared much too light to suppose that bees should carve entire cells out of it; but it seemed sufficiently thick to form the wall out of which the cell bases are carved and which separates the two sides of the comb. (This wall is shown by the zigzag lines in figure 3. Let us note that the work of bees is the reverse of what Mr. Buffon had imagined: he thought the bees built a big lump of wax in which they dug cavities by the pressure of their bodies. They build a lump, but it is so thin that it would hardly make the twenty-fourth part of the thickness of a comb: it is in this block, which is very small at first, that they build their cells as in relief, and upon its edges they attach tubes five or six lines deep. We have used the word "block" for this first outline, although it gives the idea of a massive body, but as the cell bases are carved out of this wall of wax, we cannot give it another name yet). We saw a little bee leave the cluster hanging between the combs, climb on the lath upon which the wax workers had laid the material which they had removed from under their rings, turn around the block, and after having examined both sides, begin work on our side of it. We will call this face of the block the anterior face, and we will consider the opposite side as the posterior face, no matter how we may view it later. The worker, placed on the anterior face, fixed her position horizontally so that her head faced the middle of the block (fig. 4) and moved it briskily; her teeth worked in the wax but removed fragments of it only in a very narrow space, about equal to the diameter of an ordinary cell (abgf). So there remained, at the right and the left of the cavity which she made, a certain space in which the block was still in the rough. After having chewed and moistened the particles of wax, she deposited them in the edges of the cavity: after working a few instants, she walked away from the block: another bee took her place in the same attitude, and continued the work which had just been sketched by her, a third bee soon took the place of the second, deepened the cavity, accumulated wax to the right and left, raised the already sharp lateral edges of the cavity, and gave them a straighter shape (ab, gf). It was with her teeth and her anterior legs that she compressed and fixed the particles of wax in the required position. More than twenty different bees took part in this same work: the cavity then had more depth at the base of the block than at its upper edge (adg, fig. 4): the depth of the cavity diminished from the lath up to the letter c: it resembled a fluting wider than long; its superior contour was less marked than its vertical edges. The horizontal diameter of the cavity was equal to that of an ordinary cell, but its length, in a vertical direction, was only a line and three-fifths, or about two-thirds of its diameter. I will designate this cavity as N\({}^{\circ}\) 1. When the work reached this point, we saw a bee, leaving the cluster formed by the workers, walk around the block and select its posterior face as her labor aim; but a remarkable fact was that she did not begin at the center of the block as the others had done on the anterior face, she placed herself so that her teeth acted only upon one-half of this face (cdh, fig. 5), so that the middle (ab) of the cavity which she laid out, was opposite one of the edges which lined cavity N\({}^{\circ}\) 1. At about the same time another bee began work to the right of this one, in that part of the block which she had left untouched, and which was the right side of this posterior face (cdkl, fig. 5). So these bees carved two cavities, side by side, and we will call these N\({}^{\circ}\) 2 and 3; after they had worked for some time, their places were taken by other workers which contributed in turn and separately in giving them the proper depth and shape. These two adjacent cavities were separated only by a common edge, formed from the gathering together of the wax particles drawn from their interior, and this edge (de, fig. 7) was in the center of this face and corresponded with the center of the cavity made on the opposite side by other workers (de, fig. 6). Thus a part of each of the two cavities on the posterior side was opposite the anterior cavity; this could be verified by piercing both faces with pins (fig. 6 & 7).