290 SENSE OF HEARING. 



The Sense of Hearing. 



August 29. — The result of my experiments on the 

 hearing of bees has surprised me very much. It is 

 generally considered that to a certain extent the 

 emotions of bees are expressed by the sounds they 

 make,^ which seems to imply that they possess the 

 power of hearing. I do not by any means intend to 

 deny that this is the case. Nevertheless I never found 

 them take any notice of any noise which I made, even 

 when it was close to them. I tried one of my bees 

 with a violin. I made all the noise I could, but to my 

 surprise she took no notice. I could not even see a 

 twitch of the antennae. The next day I tried the same 

 with another bee, but could not see the slightest sign 

 that she was conscious of the noise. On August 31 I 

 repeated the same experiment with another bee with 

 the same result. On September 12 and 13 I tried 

 several bees with a dog-whistle and a shrill pipe ; but 

 they took no notice whatever, nor did a set of tuning- 

 forks which I tried on a subsequent day have any more 

 effect. These tuning-forks extended over three octaves, 

 beginning with a below the ledger line. I also tried 

 with my voice, shouting, &c., close to the head of a bee ; 

 but, in spite of my utmost efforts, the bees took no 

 notice. I repeated these experiments at night when 

 the bees were quiet ; but no noise that I could make 

 seemed to disturb them in the least. 



- See, for instance, Landois, Zeits.f. wiss. Zool. 18fi7, p. 184. 



