6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 68 



Workers just emerged from the cells have a faint sweetish odor, but 

 lack the characteristic bee odor, and workers removed from the cells 

 just before they begin cutting their way out emit a fainter sweetish 

 odor. 



Old queens have a strong, sweetish odor, while the odor from 

 queens just emerged from their cells is much less pronounced. The 

 queen odor is very pleasant and is as characteristic for queens as 

 is the bee odor for workers. 



The majority of old drones have a faint odor, while almost every 

 young drone has a stronger odor. This odor is slightly different 

 from that of young workers and is less sweetish. 



While considerable experience was required of the writer before 

 he was able to distinguish differences between the odors emitted by 

 the three castes and only slight differences or none at all between 

 the odors emitted by different individuals of the same caste, the 

 following experiments show that this power of distinguishing odors 

 is quite different with the bees themselves. 



2. HIVE ODOR 



To determine if workers carry the hive odor and to ascertain 

 the significance of this odor if carried by them, one-half the frames 

 and about two-thirds of the bees were removed from hive No. 5, and 

 were placed in a new hive some distance from the old one. The 

 brood, honey, and pollen were divided as equally as possible and the 

 queen was left in the old hive. The queen was a year old and this 

 colony had never been united, so that probably nearly every worker 

 in this hive was a daughter of this queen. The old and new hives 

 may now be called hives No. 5a and 5b respectively. 



To ascertain if the workers in these two hives had become enemies ^ 

 eight days after hive No. 5 had been divided, ten triangular glass 

 observation cases were constructed. These were made of three 

 narrow wooden strips, two of which were 10 and the third 6 inches 

 long, each being half an inch wide. Cheese-cloth served as bottoms 

 and glass as tops for the cases. The apices and bases of these cases 

 rested on two supports above a rigid table and the table legs rested 

 on a concrete floor, near a window. 



Twenty middle-aged workers from a frame in hive No. 5b were 

 put into each of these cases. Ten middle-aged workers were removed 



^The words enemy and friend here as elsewhere in this paper are used 

 anthropomorphically owing to lack of more appropriate terms. 



