196 EXPERIMENTS WITH COLORED PAPERS. 



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 one 

 in Middlesex — and spreading the observations over 

 some time, so as to experiment with different bees, and 

 under varied circumstances. 



I believe that the precautions taken placed the 

 colors on an equal footing, and that the number of ex- 

 periments is sufficient to give a fair average. More- 

 over, they were spread over several days, and the daily 

 totals did not differ much from one another. The 

 result shows a marked preference for blue, then white, 

 then successively yellow, red, green, and orange. The 

 red I used was a scarlet ; pink would, I believe from 

 subsequent observations, have been more popular. I 

 may also observe that the honey on plain glass was 

 less visited than that on any of the colors, which was 

 the more significant because when I was not actually 

 observing, the colors were removed, and some drops 

 of honey left on plain glass, which naturally gave 

 the plain glass an advantage. 



Another mode of testing the result is to take the 

 number of times in which the bee went first to each 

 color, for instance, in a hundred visits she came to the 

 blue first thirty-one times, and last only four; while to 

 the plain glass she came first only five times, and last 

 twenty-four times. It may be worth while to add that 

 I by no means expected such a result. 



