A masterpiece of engineering!

William Kirby wrote of the bees as ‘those Heaven-instructed mathematicians, who before any geometer could calculate under what form a cell would occupy the least space without diminishing its capacity, and before any chemist existed to discover how wax might be elaborated from vegetable sweets, instructed by the Fountain of Wisdom, had built their hexagonal cells of that pure material, had closed them at the bottom with three rhomboidal pieces, and were enabled, without study, so to construct the opposite story of combs, that each of these rhomboids should form one of those of three opposed cells, thus giving strength to the structure, that in no other place, could have been given to it.’ (Kirby 1852, 2: 246).