270 MR. EOMANES' EXPERIMENTS. 



to become entangled in the bird-lime, and whenever I 

 found a bee so entangled, I was certain that it was one 

 which I had taken from the hive, as there were no other 

 hives in the neighbourhood. 



" Such being the method, I began by taking a score of 

 bees in the box out to sea, where there could be no land- 

 marks to guide the insects home. Had any of these 

 insects returned, I should next have taken another score 

 out to sea (after an interval of several days, so as to be 

 sure that the first lot had become permanently lost), 

 and then, before liberating them, have rotated the box 

 in a sling for a considerable time, in order to see whether 

 this would have confused their sense of direction. But, 

 as none of the bees returned after the first experiment, 

 it was clearly needless to proceed to the second. Ac- 

 cordingly, I liberated the next lot of bees on the sea- 

 shore, and, as none of these returned, I liberated another 

 lot on the lawn between the shore and the house. I 

 was somewhat surprised to find that neither did any of 

 these return, although, the distance from the lawn to 

 the hive was not above two hundred yards. Lastly, I 

 liberated bees in different parts of the flower-garden, 

 and these I always found stuck upon the bird-lime 

 within a few minutes of their liberation. Indeed, they 

 often arrived before I had had time to run from the 

 place where I had liberated them to the hive. Now, 

 as the garden was a large one, many of these bees had 

 to fly a greater distance, in order to reach the hive, 

 than was the case with their lost sisters upon the lawn, 

 and therefore I could have no doubt that their uniform 

 success in finding their way home so immediately was 

 due to their special knowledge of the flow^er-garden, 

 and not to any general sense of direction. 



