Sensory Discrimination: The Chemical Sense 107 



He then attempted to demonstrate that smell was not 

 an essential factor in guiding bees. He placed two stands 

 carrying honey, one 200 meters, the other six meters from 

 the hive, and marked the bees that visited each stand, 

 proving that a given bee almost never went to both, but 

 continued to visit the stand where it had first found honey. 

 Here, however, sight might have been the determining influ- 

 ence. Wagner (751) thinks that bees in the neighborhood 

 of the hive are influenced by visual landmarks, but that in 

 their longer flights they depend on a sense of direction, which 

 seems however to be a form of visual memory. On the 

 whole, smell would appear to be only one factor, and not 

 a very important one, in guiding the flights of bees. 



29. How Bees "Recognize" Nest Mates 



The nest smell, which characterizes each hive and pre- 

 vents the reception of strangers, who are treated precisely 

 as by ants in similar circumstances, is composed according 

 to von Buttel-Reepen of the following odors: the indi- 

 vidual odor of different workers ; the family odor, common 

 to all the offspring of the same queen ; the larval smell and 

 food smell ; the drone smell, the wax smell, and the honey 

 smell. There are various ways in which the mode of reac- 

 tion to a foreign nest smell is modified. If two bee stocks 

 are placed side by side, and one has the queen and entire 

 brood removed, it will go over to the other stock and be 

 kindly received. One can understand that the attraction 

 of the queen and brood odor may overcome the tendency 

 of the foreign nest smell to repel the invaders, but it is 

 harder to see why the more fortunate stock should allow 

 itself to be invaded. Further, a bee laden with honey 

 can get itself received by a foreign stock that has exchanged 



