156 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



far, therefore, from being at all affectionate, 1 doubt whether 

 bees are in the least fond of one another. 



Reaumur, however ('Insects,' vol. v., p. 265), nar- 

 rates a case in which a hive-bee was partly drowned and 

 so rendered insensible ; the others in the hive carefully 

 licked and otherwise tended her till she recovered. This 

 seems to show that bees, like ants, are more apt to have 

 their sympathies aroused by the sight of ailing or injured 

 companions than by that of healthy companions in distress ; 

 but Sir John Lubbock's observations above quoted go to 

 prove that even in this case display of sympathy is cer- 

 tainly not the rule. 



Powers of Communication. 



Huber says that when one wasp finds a store of honey 

 * it returns to its nest, and brings off in a short time a 

 hundred other wasps ; ' and this statement is confirmed 

 by Dujardin, who witnessed a somewhat similar perform- 

 ance in the case of bees the individual which first found 

 a concealed store informing other individuals of the fact, 

 and so on till numberless individuals had found it. 



Although the systematic experiments of Sir John 

 Lubbock have not tended to confirm these observations 

 with regard to bees and wasps, we must not too readily allow 

 his negative results to discredit these positive observations 

 more especially as we have seen that his later experi- 

 ments have fully confirmed the opinion of these previous 

 authors with respect to ants. His experiments on bees 

 and wasps consisted in exposing honey in a hidden situa- 

 tion, marking a bee or wasp that came to it, and observing 

 whether it afterwards brought any companions to share 

 the booty. He found that although the same insect 

 would return over and over again, strangers came so 

 rarely that their visits could only be attributed to acci- 

 dental and independent discovery. Only if the honey 

 were in an exposed situation, where the insects could see 

 one another feeding, would one follow the other to the 

 food. 



But we have the more reason not to accept unreservedly 



