SENSES OF BEES. 



oritely higher degree of sensibility to these minute species. Their 

 auditory organs may be such as to give them the power of ear- 

 trumpets, and their eyes may be either microscopic or telescopic, 

 or both united. Their olfactory organs may have a susceptibility 

 infinitely more exalted than ours, as indeed innumerable facts 

 prove those of many species of inferior animals to be. Art and 

 science have supplied us with numerous tests, by which the 

 physical properties of substances are distinguished, by characters 

 which escape all our senses. Why may not the Creator have 

 given to inferior animals specific organs, capable of perceiving 

 those distinctions, as surely and promptly as the eye distinguishes 

 shades of colour, the nose varieties of odour, or the ear the pitch 

 of a musical note ? 



169. Among social insects, the hive-bee stands preeminent for . 

 the manifestation of sensitive faculties. Sight, touch, smell, and 

 taste, are universally accorded to it. Hearing was regarded as 

 doubtful, but we have shown that a noise produced at any side of 

 a hive, will immediately bring there the queen and her court, to 

 see what is the matter. 



But if the sensibility of the ear be doubted, what exaltation 

 of power do we not find in the eye ! How unerring is the per- 

 ception of her dwelling, while the bee lies at distances and under 

 circumstances, which might well appear to baffle the most acute 

 human organ, aided even by human intelligence ! The little bee, 

 issuing from her hive, departs upon her industrial excursion, and 

 flies straight to the field which she has already discovered to be 

 most fertile of honey flowers. Her route to it is as straight as 

 the flight of a bullet from a gun to the object aimed at. When 

 she has gathered her load, she rises in the air, and, flying 

 back to her hive with the same unerring certainty, finds it 

 .among many, and entering it, finds the cells which are appro- 

 priated to her care. 



The sense of touch is, perhaps, even more to be admired than 

 that of sight, for it supplies the place of that sense in the darkness 

 of the internal labyrinth of the hive. In darkness the architec- 

 ture of the combs is constructed, the honey is stored in the cells 

 appropriated to it, the young are nourished, their food being 

 varied with their respective ages, the queen is recognised, and 

 all this appears to be accomplished by some sensitive power 

 possessed by the antenna), organs whose structure, nevertheless, 

 seems to be incomparably inferior to that of the human hands. 



The industrial activity of the bee is much less excited by 

 warm weather and bright sunshine, than by the prospect of col- 

 lecting an abundant supply of provisions for the hive. When 

 the lindens and the buck- wheat are in flower, they brave the rain 



87 



