550 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



excited by the dance, and they gradually quit going after nectar. 

 This behavior of bees reminds the writer of the behavior of people 

 performing a piece of work. As long as there is an abundance of 

 enthusiasm and work to be done everything goes well; but as soon 

 as the enthusiasm lags and the end of the work is in sight the or- 

 ganization weakens and becomes fdled with quitters. The many 

 experiments which he conducted caused Von Frisch to conclude that 

 only the odor which adheres to the dancer informs the other bees 

 about the location of the food to be sought, while the dance itself 

 indicates to them that there is work to be done. 



(3) Tail-wagging dance is means of communication for pollen 

 collectors. — ^Von Frisch informs us that the tail-wagging dance of 

 the pollen collectors is well known among beekeepers, and many times 

 has been described in the bee journals, with many interpretations. 

 From his own observations he explains it as a means of announcing 

 to the bees in the hive the existence of a pollen source out of doors. 

 The odor of the pollen, carried by a scout collector, tells the other 

 collectors the kind of flower or flowers furnishing it, and by scouting 

 at large over the surrounding fields the other collectors are then able 

 to find it for themselves. 



Successful scout pollen collectors, heavily laden with pollen, or 

 beebread, as some of the beekeepers call it, return from the fields to 

 their homes, where they may be seen to enter the hive; thereafter 

 they must be watched in an observation hive if one wants to see them 

 perform this particular dance, characteristically described by Von 

 Frisch as the tail-wagging dance, to distinguish it from the round 

 dance of the nectar collectors. The most striking feature of the round 

 dance is the rapid revolving or turning of the performer's abdomen 

 while small semicircles are being described, whereas the most charac- 

 teristic part of the tail-wagging dance is the wagging or swaying 

 of the abdomen while the bee runs forward quickly in a straight 

 line. In a typical case a pollen collector, laden with pollen, comes 

 home, crawls upward on the comb, and when in the midst of other 

 bees begins to attract the attention of her associates by performing 

 this peculiar dance. The dancer first describes a semicircle either to 

 the right or left on the comb (fig. 1, C), then runs forward in a 

 straight line over two or three cells to the starting point, from which 

 she describes another semicircle in the opposite direction, thus com- 

 pleting an entire circuit. The performer again returns along the 

 diameter of the circle to the original starting point, and thereafter 

 repeatedly goes through the same maneuver, alternating semicircles 

 on one side or the other with straightforward runs. The running in 

 semicircles is done quietly, without any striking movement, but each 

 time the dancer makes the straightforward run she wags her tail 

 from 4 to 12 times. These waggings consist of very quick, rhyth- 



