The age-herald., 1902-05-18
Bees and Their Hives
Harvey Sutherland in Ainslee's.

)d that beeswax was pollen chewed up hto a paste In that month and year a French peasant, name now lost, reported Ihe exact truth about it's manufacture lo his local society of beekeepers. And bow do you suppose he made this great discovery? You'd never guess 1t In the world. He watched them make 1t. irl- Gead of trying to reason about it. Bees Ire telescopic animals, and in where bne part slides into another he saw lhe scales of wax forming If you feed chickens generously and shut them up In dark. warm place, they fatten quick ly Beeswax is not chemically fat, but It is so near allied thereto that 1t is sec teted under precisely the, same conditions. The bees fill themselves as full of honey Rs they can hold, cluster in a bunch In the. warmth and darkness of the hive and in about five days the wax Is sweat ed out in little plates. They take them out and chew them up to make them soft and pllable for comb-building Wax costs fifteen times It's weight in honey and the bees make 1t go as far as pos Bihle. One pound of beeswax VIII nclose about 35 OO0 honey cells. To save them all the bother he can, the mQdern pee keeper supplies his bees with the miu- rib, or foundation, on each side or Wncn they build cells about half an inch oeep and about one-fifth of an inch In di- ameter The foundations are sheets or WAX run through rollers that stamp them with pyramidal indentations. One cell does not back spare up against another. If you stick needles through the facets khnt make the pyramidal indentation in the back of cell they will come out in three cells on the other side. That dis tributes the weight of the honey better.
 One of the strange things about us hu- man beings is that we cannot seem to get it into our heads that the truth is more delightful than any kind of a story that we can make up Here is the bees making six-sided honey cells, each one bottomed with three diamond-shapeo facets. To fill a space with boxes that would fit together snugly the boxes would have to bo triangles. squares or hexagons. or these the hexagon contains the most in proportion to the material used in making the box. The romanticists and realists (for therG are romanticists and realists in science, as in everything else) ere half a mind that the bees figured all this out themselves by their own wis., dom, and half a mind that they have no sense at all, but are pretty little auto mata wound up and set a-going at an angle of GO degrees. If you will sit tight now and hold fast I will try to show you how far advanced they would have to be in plane and solid geometry to lay off one of those three diamond-shaped facets that close the end of the six-sided cell If we are going to be mathematical we might as well be hanged for an old sheep as killed for a young lamb, so we will call the damond-shaped facet rhomb an equilateral parallelogram, having oblique angles. Now, assuming that the comb equals its ideal form, to close up a cell each of the three rhombs must have its wide angle-I beg your pardon, obtuse. I should have said-must have its obtuse angle of such size that half of 1t has for its tangent the square root of g. That quite clear to you? Some day, when you are not otherwise employed, you may spend a pleasant afternoon ex- tracting the square root of g. will put 1t another way. The diagonals of each rhomb must be to each other as the side and the diagonal of square. One can imagine the first bee that landed cipher ing out this problem on the blackboard, thumbing over it's book of logarithms, till 1t finally set down. Tan square root of equals 54 deg. N min. sec.;" null tiply that by to get the whole obtuse angle. 109 deg. 2S min. Is sec.; subtract ing that from 1S0 deg to get the acute angle, which Is 70 deg 31 min A sec, and 
 happy sigh and hunting up the scis- sors to cut out a pattern to fit q hex agon whose diameter Is one-fifth of an inch
 But wait There's more. Maraldi meas ured the angles of these rhombs and then gave the problem to Koelig to solve. Koenigs calculations for the pyra- mid that would most economically end a hexagonal prism differed from Maraldrs bV two minutes of do. gree. Worried about 1t, he worked un- til he found printers error in his table of logarthms that had led him astray by just so much Whereupon Lord Brougham threw up his hands and cluck- ed his astonsh,nent that the hive bee should have solved most recondite mathematical problem so absolutely that it corrected a standard book of refer ence. And how wonderful the bee Is, and what a lesson this should be to us, and SO on and so on.
 What nonsense! An error of two min utes in a degree Maraldi was the one mat made 1t, of course, for that means a divergence so small that two lines forming this angle would travel IA feet before separating one inch. Listen; the wax in comb is as thin as the bees working In 1t can scrape out without making holes in 1t. Blow a soap bubble; as 1t floats in the air 1t is a globe which has the greatest possible content in pro- portion to its envelope. Put 1t on plate and if 1t doesn't burst the bottom is fiat. Surround 1t with six other bubbles. The equal tension of the meeting films will nS1ke the central bubble a hexagon. just as the equal tension of the thin wax with the bees working in it and pressing against each other makes it hexagon. Oh, the marvellous geometry of the honey bee! Oh. the profound mathematics of soaps suds!
 If Lord Brougham had only used his eyes he would have seen that the outer cells of the honeycomb are cylindrical. just as the outer bubbles of a mass of froth are globular. Besides, worker-celIs and drone cells are not of the same diameter, to say nothing of the pear shaped queen cells, so a comb couldn't be Tnathematically exact. Almost every cell in a honeycomb is out of a true hex agon by at least three or four degrees. Falsehood, willful or careless, always de- grades that which 1t Is intended to exalt. The bee Is something vastly more wor- shipful than an automaton that goes on making hexagons world without end. is all instinct with mind-mind that diff fers In degree only from that of the almighty God himself in whom we live and move and have our being. He has made us all. from the jellyfish to the philosopher, "of one blood. for to dwell on all the face of the earth" and the bee is like us except that instead of the individual living long time and learn-