682 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. DdC. 



discover that there are more wonderful facts concerning the bee 

 which were verifiable than any which were concocted to fill the 

 book. 



The three things which I have mentioned are difficulties which 

 even men have who are well trained in observation. It takes much 

 practice before the observations made by any person are of any 

 value, and if we could but prevent people from publishing their 

 results until they really know how to observe what a blessing it 

 would be to apiculture. There are other obstacles which we con- 

 tinually meet, such as the tendency to generalize from one or two 

 observations, and the drawing of wrong conclusions because of bad 

 logic. We may find examples of these later, but there is one other 

 grave fault of which I wish to speak before leaving this subject. 

 I refer to the use of the word "Instinct." 



I have no desire at this time to go into a discussion of the causes 

 and nature of Instincts. An instinct may be defined as a natural 

 impulse, leading animals, even prior to all experience, to perform cer- 

 tain actions tending to the welfare of the individual or the perpetua- 

 tion of the species, apparently without understanding the object at 

 which it may be supposed to aim or without deliberating as to the 

 best methods to employ. There are many actions of the bee which 

 are carried out by newly-hatched bees and for which we can see no 

 cause. The difficulty here is that whenever an observer comes across 

 an action which he cannot understand, and for which he can find 

 no method of formation, he throws it into the general pile of "in- 

 stincts" without further effort to find a cause. Is it not evident 

 that what we so often call instincts are but actions which we do 

 not understand? I believe, and I am not alone in my belief, that 

 every instinct has a physical cause in the structure of the animal 

 or its environment, and unless we do our utmost to arrive at the 

 ultimate cause of these actions we have not finished our problem. 

 There is a tendency for all men to think that when they have a 

 name for a thing and can use the word fluently that they understand 

 all the details of the question, but we must constantly avoid this. 

 As an example of this, let us take the duties of the bees at different 

 ages. Briefly, they work as follows: For the first day or two the 

 young bees do not work on account of their weak condition, but they 

 soon take up the duties inside the hive, such as wax-building, 

 nursing the developing larvye, cleaning the hive, etc. Later, gen- 

 erally when about sixteen to nineteen days old, they begin to fly 

 from the. hive and ordinarily never do any of the inside work of the 

 hive which they did before. Of course it must be understood that 

 varying conditions may change their actions, but this is what nor- 

 mally happens. Young bees do, of course, fly from the hive in what 

 is called their exercise flight on warm afternoons, but they do not 

 go so far from the hive but that they can be guided back by their 

 sense of smell. Why do they go through this cycle? We can, of 

 course, say that instinct impels them to do all these things, but how 

 much more do we know about it when we have given a name to the 

 impulse unless we look farther? 



I have not investigated this problem very much, and do not wish 

 it understood that I think that I have arrived at the ultimate and 

 complete cause of this cycle of action, but certain facts seem t) 

 me to indicate that there is an organic cause back of all this. The 



