1913- Mo'FFAT.— Bees a?id P/owers. yt 
not the flowers it was looking for, and which it invariably 
left without gathering from them as soon as it saw what 
they were. But why in the world did it make so many 
as fifteen mistakes, all at the same flower, and that a blue 
one, when the flowers from which it was gathering were 
pink ? Could the moth be colour-bhnd ? No, it was not, 
for it passed many clumps of Milkwort that were pink 
without noticing them at all, and only tried at the blue 
ones. So it saw the difference between blue and pink in 
the Milkwort, and yet it made no confusion between pink 
Milkwort and pink Red-Rattle, but made, as I thought at 
the time, the far more unaccountable blunder of confusing 
blue Milkwort with pink Pedicularis. 
That was on June loth, 1897. On May 23rd in the 
following year I met with another specimen of the Bee 
Hawk-Moth whose conduct throws, I think, a little light 
on that of the insect which made so many abortive darts 
at the blue Milkwort. It was one of four Bee Hawk -Moths 
which I watched during that day, for there seemed to have 
been rather an outburst of them.. Two were visiting 
exclusively the flowers of the Primrose, which they are well 
adapted for fertiHsing ; the third was gathering exclusively 
from Red-Rattle — also a flower very specially adapted for 
fertilisation by insects with long probosces ; and the fourth 
was also gathering from Red-Rattle, but turned aside, 
and this time not in vain, to gather (or rather drink) from 
a blue flower — and that blue flower was our friend Ajuga 
reptans. 
The Bee Hawk-Moth, therefore, resembles the Carder 
Bee in hking the honey of Ajuga reptans, but apparently 
it further resembles it in not daring to take that honey 
except in a mixture with something else ; and we find the 
curious further point of similarity that the honey of the 
Dwarf Red-Rattle is found by both insects a suitable 
antidote to the too narcotic though nice nectar of the 
Bugle. I think it is only fair to suggest that the Hawk- 
Moth which I thought so stupid the previous year in con- 
fusing blue Milkwort with pink Red-Rattle was really 
acting quite rationally in making all those plunges at the 
