From Michael Bush's reprint of "Huber's Observations on Bees" Volume II Page 379:

In a section titled: "detailed description of the work of the bees"...I don't know of any modern observations that are comparable.

"The worker, placed on the anteriour face, fixed her position horizontally so that her head faced the middle of the block [the little featureless piece of wax the bees started by depositing] and moved it briskly; 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.  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 the edges of the cavity:  after workign 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, and gave them a straighter shape.  It was with her teeth and her anterior legs that she compressed and fixed the particles of wax in the required position."

There is much more (more than I'm willing to type), and there are great diagrams (I think beekeepers owe Michael a debt of gratitude...he did an amazing job making this important material available and legible).  The above was to show the use of mouth parts in the molding of the wax.  The many pages of description that follow (and their diagrams) tell a story of something like "foundation" being built less than a cell diameter at a time ahead of the comb that is being drawn.  The hexagonal "walls" between the cells are straight lines before the entire perimeter of the cell is completed...it was never a "round" cell, although the very beginning of manipulating the wax from a flat plane to a zigzag mid rib appears rounded, there does not appear to be a point at which a round cell is pressed or heated into a hexagonal one.  Material is removed/moved until straight lines are left.

The statments made previously:
"They build cylinders, which then deform under pressure into the "toth" crystalline structure we
know as a bee cell, just as adjacent soap bubbles blown between two sheets of glass will deform."

...doesn't ring true.  There is never a round cylinder in comb building.  Drawing foundation is undobtedly different from building comb, but I'd still be surprised to see "cylinders"....we've all seen just started foundation, and it's all hexes.

deknow

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