304 EXPERIMENTS TO TEST 



slides for the microscope, viz. 3 inches by 1, and pasted 

 them on slips of paper of the same size, coloured re- 

 spectively blue, green, orange, red, white, and yellow. 

 I then put them on a lawn, in a row, about a foot apart, 

 and on each put a second slip of glass with a drop of 

 honey. I also put with them a slip of plain glass with a 

 similar drop of honey. I had previously trained a marked 

 bee to come to the place for honey. My plan then was, 

 when the bee returned and had sipped about for a quarter 

 of a minute, to remove the honey, when she flew to another 

 slip. This then I took away, when she went to a third ; 

 and so on. In this way as bees generally suck for 

 three or four minutes I induced her to visit all the 

 drops successively before returning to the nest. When 

 she had gone to the nest I transposed all the upper 

 glasses with the honey, and also moved the coloured 

 glasses. Thus, as the drop of honey was changed each 

 time, and also the position of the coloured glasses, neither 

 of these could influence the selection by the bee. 



In recording the results I marked down successively 

 the order in which the bee went to the different coloured 

 glasses. For instance, in the first journey from the 

 nest, as recorded below, the bee lit first on the blue, 

 which accordingly I marked 1 ; when the blue was 

 removed, she flew about a little and then lit on the 

 white ; when the white was removed, she settled on the 

 green ; and so on successively on the orange, yellow, 

 plain, and red. I repeated the experiment a hundred 

 times, using two different hives one in Kent and 



