CONSPICUOUS FLOWERS RARELY VISITED BY INSECTS 173 



yield no booty; but this loss is reduced to a minimum by their 

 ability to learn from experience. They are able to store up in 

 their brains, as described by Forel, various sense impressions of 

 color, form and spatial position, by which their movements are 

 subsequently guided and which prevent them from indefinitely 

 making useless visits. ' It results, therefore, from the unanimous 

 observations of all the connoisseurs that sensation and percep- 

 tion, and association, inference, memory and habit follow in 

 the social insects the same fundamental laws as in the vertebrates 

 and ourselves."^ But he adds that "the above mentioned 

 faculties are manifested in an extremely feeble form beyond the 

 confines of the instinct-automatism stereotyped in the species." ^ 

 In closing this paper it is desirable to remind the reader that 

 the visits of bees to flowers are, of course, often influenced by 

 other factors besides the characters of the flowers, as temperature, 

 rainy or foggy weather, the numb.er of insects in the locality, 

 and especially by the blooming period of common plants very 

 rich in nectar. During the honey-flow from the more important 

 honey plants, bees restrict their visits very closely to a single 

 species, and there is no occasion nor would it be for their advantage 

 to pay attention to flowers containing little or no nectar. Plateau 

 himself noticed that when the apricots expanded their flowers, the 

 Hymenoptera abandoned the violets, and he was forced to 

 discontinue his experiments with artificial flowers. <> During a 

 honey-flow the entire force of field bees of each colony is largely 

 governed by a common impulse, and their attention maybe fairly 

 termed obsessional. The hives may then be opened and the 

 honey exposed with scarcely any danger of robbing. Buttel- 

 Reepen tells of a bee-keeper who placed a dish of honey over his 

 strongest colony during the buckwheat honey-flow, and after 

 eight days of good forage the bees had not touched the honey, 

 although it was pure. ** Manifestly, under these conditions 



» Honey-bees will not visit bright-hued pieces of paper or cloth, whether large or 

 small, attached to a line and suspended over a bed of flowers, or crude floral groups 

 painted on large screens or walls, because they are not deceived by these objects, or 

 images, any more than ourselves. Cf. Plateau, F., " Le Macroglosse," Mem. Soc. ent. 

 de Belgique, 12:141-80, 1906. 



" Forel, August, "Ants and Some Other Insects," translated by William Morton 

 Wheeler, p. 21. 



"Plateau, F., " Les fleurs artificielles et les insectes," Mem. de I' Acad. roy. de 

 Belgique, 1:24, 1906. 



« Buttel-Reepen, H. V., "Are Bees Reflex Machines," p. 27. 



