378 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
load of honey and returned twice, he then transposed the papers, but she 
returned to the honey on the blue paper. After she made three more visits, 
always to the blue paper, he transposed them again, and she again followed 
the color. He made many similar experiments using many different colors 
during the same experiment, and found that a bee placed on any particular 
color invariably returned to that color, but he did not attribute the fact to 
any preference for the color but simply because it happened to be placed on 
that color. 
He next tried to determine whether bees have any preference for one 
color over another, a thing which some naturalists have denied. He took slips 
of glass, and pasted on them slips of paper colored respectively, red, blue, 
green, orange, white and yellow. He 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. He also put with them a slip of plain giass with a drop of honey. 
His plan was, when the bee returned and had sipped for a quarter of a min- 
ute, to remove the honey, when she flew to another slip. This was taken 
away, and she went to a third; and so on. In this way he induced her to visit 
all the different colors before returning to the hive. When she had gone to 
the hive he transposed all the glasses with the honey and also moved the 
colored glasses. So, as the drop of honey was changed each time, and also 
the position of the colored glasses, neither of these could influence the selec- 
tion by the bee. He repeated the experiment a hundred times. using different 
bees, and in different places, under varied circumstancs, and always with the 
same result; they showed a decided preference for blue. He then tried a 
series of experiments, in which the bees had been trained for three weeks 
previously, to come to a particular spot on a lawn, by placing honey on a 
plain glass. This would naturally give the plain glass an advantage, never- 
theless the blue still retained its pre-eminence. Lubbock has also shown why 
blue flowers are not more common, something we would naturally expect 
if bees have a preference for that color and also have much to do with the 
origin of flowers. He believes the explanation to lie in the fact that blue 
flowers are the most highly specialized and that all blue flowers have de- 
scended from ancestors in which the flowers were green, and that they have 
passed through stages of white (or yellow), and usually red, before becom- 
ing blue. Among violets, for instance, we find some yellow and some blue, 
and in this case yellow was the original color. 
Other naturalists have also pointed out that blue flowers, which, accord- 
ing to this view, are descended from white or yellow ancestors, passing in 
many cases through a red stage, frequently vary, as if the colors had not had 
time to fix themselves, and by atavism assume their original color. Many 
blue flowers are often reddish or white, others normally blue, but occasionally 
yellow. On the other hand flowers which are normally white or yellow, very 
rarely vary to blue. However, Lubbock thinks that his experiments show 
that bees prefer one color to another, and that blue is their favorite. 
If then, we consider the work of the bee, how much we must be im- 
pressed with its permanent character compared to man’s. Whole races of 
men have come and have withered away into the dust from which they 
spring—and what remains of them? We know that the whole continent on 
which we live has in times past been inhabited by races of men that came— 
no one knows from where—and passed away—leaving as monuments to fu- 
ture generations—what? A few heaps of bones found here and there, strewn 
