120 Beekeeping 



facts concerning the gathering of bees are of interest. If 

 honey is exposed where it is accessible to bees, they go to it 

 by the hundreds, if there is no nectar in the field, and under 

 these circumstances they are on the lookout for openings 

 in other hives so that they can rob. On the other hand, 

 during a nectar-flow honey may sometimes be exposed in 

 the apiary without a bee coming near it. 1 This leads some- 

 times to the conclusion that bees prefer nectar to honey. 

 Even if honey is placed in a feeder inside the hive, it is often 

 not touched during a heavy nectar-flow. 



Division of labor in gathering. 



There has been little done on the division of labor outside 

 the hive but Bonnier 2 has written a paper of great interest 

 on this subject. Whether his conclusions may be accepted 

 must depend upon future experiments, but a resume* of his 

 paper is of interest. The field bees are divided by him into 

 two classes, searchers and collectors. Searchers fly to vari- 

 ous plants, gathering some nectar and some pollen and light- 

 ing on many neighboring objects, and behave much as do 

 wasps, which are generally searchers. A bee is transformed 



Primulace or Compositse or from yellow flowers to pink, white or purple. 

 He concludes that the majority of bees are constant, but if watched long 

 enough they are by no means so, that "few bees appear to be able to with- 

 stand the temptation of a Garden," where a variety of plants present them- 

 selves, and that "the Hive-bee appeared to be fully as inconstant as the wild 

 Humble-bees." Bulman gives records of 48 observations on honeybees 

 in a garden which were inconstant. That bees go from white clover 

 (Trifolium repens) to alsike clover (T. hybridum) or to two species of another 

 genus which are perhaps less readily distinguishable to an untrained human 

 eye should not excite wonder. All that can be claimed from the known 

 facts concerning the so-called constancy of the honeybee is that if enough 

 flowers of one kind are easily accessible, they seem to prefer those of one 

 kind. They usually do not fly from dandelion to apple blossom, although 

 Ord records one such case. No more than this is needed to make bees more 

 beneficial to the fruit-grower than they would be if their visits were entirely 

 promiscuous. 



1 Zander, Enoch, 1913. Das Geruchsvermogen der Bienen. Biol. 

 Centralbl., XXXIII, pp. 711-716. 



2 Bonnier, Gaston, 1906. Sur la division du travail chez les abeilles. 

 Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances de 1'academie des sciences, 

 CXLIII, pp. 941-946. 



