io8 The Animal Mind 



hives with it, where an unladen bee is attacked ; here the 

 smell of the honey may overcome the foreign smell. As is 

 well known, two alien stocks may be united by sprinkling 

 them with some odorous substance. The queen odor is 

 the strongest factor in the nest smell ; in swarming it over- 

 comes the tendency to return to the old nest, and queen- 

 less swarms will join themselves to foreign swarms having a 

 queen. The apparent attention paid to the queen while 

 laying eggs, the gathering of workers around her trilling 

 their antennae toward her, suggest strongly that her odor is 

 pleasant to them. The queen, herself, however, is per- 

 fectly indifferent to any foreign nest smell, and will beg 

 food of any bee, even those which are angrily crowded 

 around her cage in a foreign hive. Drones also will go from 

 stock to stock, and are always peacefully received until 

 drone-killing time begins. It has usually been supposed 

 that the unrest displayed by a bee stock when deprived of 

 its queen is due to the absence of the queen odor, and it 

 seems almost certain that this must be a powerful influence, 

 though von Buttel-Reepen thinks it is not the only influ- 

 ence, for he has observed that if the queen be replaced in 

 the honey space, removed from the rest of the hive, the 

 bees will quiet instantly, before the smell has had time to 

 diffuse itself. Also, bees sometimes behave as if they had 

 lost their queen when she is only put in a cage, and her odor 

 is perfectly accessible (115). 



It is clear that bees as well as ants are capable of dis- 

 tinguishing a considerable number of smell qualities. Prob- 

 ably the same thing is true of the social wasps. In the 

 solitary wasps, however, we find less evidence of a highly 

 developed sense of smell, or rather of a great variety of smell 

 reactions, and the solitary bees are very likely less influenced 

 by smell than the social bees. In the interesting study of 



