The Scent Language of Honey Bees' 



By Ronald Ribbands 



School of Agriculture, University of Cambridge 



(Formerly at Bee Department, Rothamsted Experimental Station 



Harpenden, Herts., England) 



[With 2 plates] 



It is a relaxation to turn from the pressing problems of our own 

 community life to study for a while the social life of the honey bee, 

 wliich is very interesting and quite different from our own. Only a 

 small proportion of the two million different kinds of insects that 

 exist today live in communities, and of these only a few share the 

 honey bee's habit of living in a large and well-organized society. 

 We know more about the mode of life and the behavior of the honey 

 bee than that of any other social insect, because the economic value of 

 its honey and its wax made it worth while for man to domesticate 

 this insect, with the result that its activities have been kept under close 

 observation for many centuries. 



As in all other social insects, the family forms the social unit, and 

 there has been no integration above that level ; never does one come 

 across a number of families associating together to form a commu- 

 nity in the way that happens in the case of man. Nevertheless a 

 honey-bee colony can reach a considerable size, and it may come to 

 contain as many as 70,000 worker bees, all of them the progeny of 

 one fertile female, their queen. The queen lays all the eggs, and 

 the workers carry out all the other work of the colony. The efficient 

 functioning of this large family is clearly impossible unless its mem- 

 bers are able to communicate with each other effectively, and recent 

 researches have shown that taste and smell play an important role 

 in the methods of communication used by honey bees. 



BEE SCENT 



Over 50 years ago — in 1901, to be exact — Frank Sladen recorded 

 that he had noticed a distinct and somewhat pungent odor arising 

 from a swarm of bees that he was putting into a hive. He noted, 



^ Reprinted by permission from Discovery, January 1955, 



369 



