326 GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. Feb. 15 



I use the expressive term "hive odor" (colony odor, exhalation odor), under which I com- 

 prehend only the existence of gaseous substances disseminated in a colony, the presence 

 of which is detected by the bees' sense of smell. 



1 believe that the following odors are present in a colony of bees : 



1. The Individual Odor. It can be easily demonstrated that the queen odor (see p. 7) 

 varies with different individuals, and on the same ground (germinal variation), an indi- 

 vidual odor should be assigned to the workers. 



2. All offspring of one mother (queen) have a common inherited family odor in addi- 

 tion to the individual odors, belonging only to the progeny of one queen. 



j. The brood and chyle odor (p. 9). 



4. The drone odor (p. 10). 



5. The wax odor. Since the wax is a glandular secretion, an exuded product, it may be 

 safely taken for granted that, considered apart from the specific odor of wax, the indi- 

 vidual odors of the wax-generators adhere to the honey-comb. Accordingly the wax 

 structures of different colonies have different odors. 



6. The honey odor. That the honey of each colony (mixed with a secretion of the 

 salivary glands) has its specific odor is readily seen from the old practice of bee-keepers 

 tn which Bethe also alludes. If a queen be daubed with honey from a queenless colons, 

 she will be accepted readily by that colony when inserted. 



7. The hive odor (exhalation odor, colony odor). The hive odor is composed normally 

 by a mixture of the preceding odors, or of some of them. Single bees, therefore, besides 

 their individual odors, possess the family odor and especially the common adhering hive 

 odor, which forms the dominant factor in the various actions toward hive mates and 

 hive strangers — that is, in mutual recognition between bees. 



If a strange queen is put into a queenless colony in a cage, a confinement of twenty- 

 four hours is usually sufficient for the queen to have received the "hive substance," as 

 Bethe calls it; that is, she has become "scented." " The external adherence of the colony 

 odor therefore suffices to make the bees permanently friendly with the foreign queen. If 

 a swarm is made of the bees hanging in front of several hives," which in strong colonies 

 often form great clusters (beards), by scooping them up in a ladle, there will probably 

 be bees from ten, twenty or thirty different hives. If they are put into a hive and given 

 a queen, with the observance of proper precautions, these bees from let us say, thirty differ- 

 ent hives, form a peaceful colony in a few hours, which adjusts itself in its new dwelling 

 ind takes up the ordinary tasks of the day. Here we have thirty family odors, and about 

 thirty to forty thousand individual odors united into a special hive odor, peculiar to this 

 colony alone, merely by the scooping together. The proof of this can be found in the 

 fact that a queen placed in such a colony can be set free frequently after only twelve to 

 twenty-four hours ; she has taken up the hive odor. 



We see, therefore, in this case, a colony without a specific family odor conducting 

 itself exactly like colonies which are made up of the offspring of one mother. In each 

 case the hive odor is formed by the union and mixing of individual odors. 



Now the question arises: Is this hive odor inherited? No, surely not, for the hive 

 odor, therefore the common odor, that each individual can take up in an external way is 

 something purely exogenous or acquired. 



The power of the hive odor seems to me, therefore, to lie not in the inherent family 

 odor nor in the inherited individual odors, but in the exogenous mixture of the two. 

 What Bethe (1. c, p. 43) alleges for compound nests (Schiittelnester), and communicates 

 in his experiments on bees (p. 71), is not a contradiction of this. He says that bees 

 that had been transferred to another hive did attack almost not at all or with only slight 

 enmity their sisters remaining in the mother hive because the common family odor les- 

 sened the hostile reaction. This proves merely that the hive odor differs from the family 

 odor. If the latter were the predominant factor, bees of the same family would always 

 be friendly with each other, which is not the case. 



•» Further on I shall show that in many cases the bees very likely become familiar with the odor 

 of the queen, which is a mixture of the queen odor and the hive odor. 



*• G. Dathe, Lehrbuch der Bienenzucht, 6 Aufl. Bensheim, 1892; Bienenzeitung, 7 Jahrg., No. 19. 



