POWER OF HEARING. 313 



out intermission the whole day, and was more or less 

 regularly visited by the marked bees and wasps. 



My experiments, then, in opposition to the state- 

 ments of Huber and Dujardin, serve to show that wasps 

 and bees do not in all cases convey to one another in- 

 formation as to food which they may have discovered, 

 though I do not doubt that they often do so. Of 

 course, when one wasp has discovered and is visiting 

 a supply of syrup, others are apt to come too ; but I 

 believe that in many instances they merely follow one 

 another. If they communicated the fact, considerable 

 numbers would at once make their appearance ; but I 

 have not often found this to be the case. The frequent 

 and regular visits which my wasps paid to the honey 

 put out for them, prove that it was very much to their 

 taste ; yet few others made their appearance. 



These and other observations of the same tendency 

 seem to show that, even if wasps have the power of in- 

 forming one another when they discover a store of good 

 food, at any rate they do not habitually do so. 



On the whole, wasps seem to me more clever in 

 finding their way than bees. I tried wasps with the 

 glass mentioned on p. 278, but they had no difficulty 

 in finding their way out. 



My wasps, though courageous, were always on the 

 alert, and easily startled. It was, for instance, more 

 difficult to paint them than the bees ; nevertheless, 

 though I tried them with a set of tuning-forks covering 



15 



