190 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



Bees are highly particular in the matter of keeping 

 their hives pure, and their sanitary arrangements often 

 exhibit intelligence of a high order. 



The following is quoted from Buchner (^loc. cit, p, 

 248) :— 



Impure air within the hive is that which the bees must 

 above all things fear and avoid, for with the pressure together 

 of so many individuals in a comparatively small space, it would 

 not only be directly harmful to individual bees, but would pro- 

 duce among them dangerous diseases. They therefore also never 

 void their excrements within, but always outside the hive. 

 While this is very easy to do in summer, it is, on the contrary, 

 very difficult in the winter, when the bees sit close together 

 and generally motionless in the upper part of the hive, and 

 when, from impure air and foul evaporations, as well as from 

 bad and insufficient food, dysentery-like diseases break out 

 among them, and often carry ofif the whole community in a brief 

 space of time. In such cases they utilise the first fine day to 

 relieve themselves, and in the spring they take a long general 

 cleansing flight. But they also know how to take advantage of 

 special circumstances so as to perform the process of purification 

 in the way least harmful to the hive. Herr Heinrich Lehr, of 

 Darmstadt, a bee-keeping friend of the author, has sent the fol- 

 lowing communication : — During an epidemic of dysentery in 

 winter, from which most of his hives suffered (as the bees were 

 no longer able to retain their excrements), one hive suffered less 

 than the others. Exact investigation showed that this hive was 

 soiled all over at the back with the excrement of the bees, and 

 that the inmates had here made a kind of drain. On this spot 

 a little opening had been made by the falling off of the covering 

 clay, which led directly to the upper part of the hive, where the 

 bees were accustomed to sit together during the winter. This 

 excellent opportunity, whereby they could reach in the shortest 

 way an otherwise difficult object, and one rendered complicated 

 by circumstances, did not escape them. 



It sometimes happens that mice, slugs, &c., enter 

 a beehive. • They are then killed and covered with a 

 coating of propolis. Eeaumur says ^ that he once saw a 

 snail enter a hive in this way. The hard shell was an 

 effective protection against the stings of the bees, so the 

 insects smeared round the edges of the shell with wax and 

 > See Kirhy and Spence, vol. ii., p. 229. 



