372 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 5 



In another experiment using the same apparatus, bees from one 

 colony were trained to dish g, and no bees at all were trained to dish h. 

 Both dishes were then supplied with sugar syrup. During the next 

 2 hours 45 recruits went to dish a, but only 3 visited dish &. Dishes a 

 and h were then exchanged, and after some initial confusion the 

 trained bees now proceeded to visit dish h — in other words, a new dish 

 on the old site. During the next 15 minutes 9 more recruits came 

 along, and all but one of these went to dish a, which the trained bees 

 were no longer visiting. Thus the recruits were not being attracted 

 by either the sight or sound of the trained bees, hut hy something 'per- 

 taining to the dish that they had previously visited. The lure could 

 only be bee scent. Moreover, as dishes frequented by hive mates are 

 more attractive than dishes frequented by strange bees, the bee scents 

 that come from bees of different colonies must be different. 



These simple experiments demonstrate that honey bees can recog- 

 nize their companions because they possess a distinctive smell, which 

 is different from that of the honey bees of another colony. 



THE ORIGIN OF THE DISTINCTIVE ODORS 



This phenomenon of recognition offered another fascinating prob- 

 lem for investigation: Wliat is the mechanism whereby honey bees 

 come to possess these distinctive odors ? Further experiments showed 

 that these odors were not inherited, and these were followed by a 

 series of experiments which proved that they derived from the food 

 supplies that had been eaten by the bees. 



These experiments were of two kinds. In the first set of experi- 

 ments, colonies were divided into portions; the different portions of 

 each colony were fed with different kinds of honey, and the bees in the 

 differently fed portions were shown to possess different odors. In 

 the other set of expei iments, all the food supplies were removed from 

 several colonies; all these hives were then taken to a Welsh moor, 

 where they could obtain nectar from only a single species of flower, 

 namely ling {Galluna) ; all these different colonies, after feeding on 

 the same diet, came to possess the same odor. 



FOOD SHARING 



These results in turn suggested still more interesting problems. It 

 is easy to imderstand how all the bees in a colony acquire the same scent 

 when the food supply is homogeneous, as in the instance just cited 

 where all the bees fed on the same kind of nectar, but it is not easy to 

 understand how they all produce the same scent when a mixture made 

 up of many different kinds of nectar is taken into the hive. Another 

 set of experiments answered this question by demonstrating that the 



