304 EXPERIMENTS TO TEST 



slides for the microscope, viz. 3 inches by 1, and pasted 

 on them slips of paper coloured respectively blue, green, 

 orange, red, white, and yellow. I then put them on a lawn, 

 in a row, about a foot apart, and on each put a second 

 slip of glass with a drop of honey. I also put with them 

 a slip of plain glass with a similar drop of honey. I had 

 previously trained a marked bee to come to the place for 

 honey. My plan then was, when the bee returned and 

 had sipped about for a quarter of a minute, to remove the 

 honey, when she flew to another slip. This then I took 

 away, when she went to a third ; and so on. In this 

 way — as bees generally suck for three or four minutes 

 — I induced her to visit all the droj)s successively before 

 returning to the nest. When she had gone to the nest 

 I transposed all the upper glasses with the honey, and 

 also moved the coloured glasses. Thus, as the drop of 

 honey was changed each time, and also the position of 

 the coloured glasses, neither of these could influence 

 the selection by the bee. 



In recording the results I marked down successively 

 the order in which the bee went to the different coloured 

 glasses. For instance, in the first journey from the 

 nest, as recorded below, the bee lit first on the blue, 

 which accordingly I marked 1 ; when disturbed from 

 the blue, she flew about a little and then lit on the 

 white.; when the white was removed, she settled on 

 the green ; and so on successively on the orange, yellow, 

 plain, and red. I repeated the experiment a hundred 

 times, using two different hives — one in Kent and 



