232 The Animal Mind 



near the foot of Vesuvius and beside some very tall and 

 conspicuous trees. The bees failed to return, and Bethe 

 thinks, if they were guided by vision, the mountain and the 

 trees should have aided them to do so (53). It may well be, 

 of course, that bees cannot see objects at such a distance. 

 Besides his observation that changing the appearance of a 

 hive did not disturb the bees in their homing flight, Bethe 

 urges against the visual memory hypothesis an observa- 

 tion on a hive which had on one side of it a garden, and on 

 the other side a town, which he thinks the bees never visited, 

 as food was to be had in abundance in the garden. Yet 

 when liberated in the town they flew back to the hive with 

 an accuracy certainly not born of their acquaintance with 

 the locality (51). Von Buttel-Reepen, however, doubts 

 whether the bees really never visited the town. Bethe's 

 most striking illustration of his unknown force, however, 

 is derived from his " box-experiments." If a number of 

 bees are carried in a box some distance from the hive, on 

 being liberated they fly straight up in the air. Some of 

 them will return to the hive, but if the distance is great 

 enough, many will drop back upon the box. Now if the 

 box has moved only a few centimeters away during the 

 flight of the bees, they will drop back to the precise spot 

 where it was, and take no notice of its new location. If 

 they were guided by vision, Bethe urges, they could easily 

 see the box (51, 53). This, says von Buttel-Reepen, is 

 arguing that their visual memory must be like ours if it 

 exists at all ; it may be a memory, not of the appearance 

 of the box, but of its locality. He himself, repeating 

 Bethe's experiments, observed the bees on dropping back 

 after their upward flight, hunting not at the place where 

 the box had been, but at a height which was about that of 

 their home hive entrance. He thinks that an important 



