IO 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS 



VOL. 



65 



in the third to fourteenth columns represent the average per cent or 

 number of bees eating a particular food at any one count. 



TABLE II 



The preceding results clearly show that when bees are given prefer- 

 ences between pure foods and foods containing strong repellents they 

 freely eat the former and refuse the latter, and when they are fed 

 foods containing repellents without having a preference for pure 

 foods, they eat sparingly. Judging from these experiments we are 

 certainly safe in saying that the bees avoided the foods containing 

 repellents on account of the odors emitted from these substances. 



3. Experiments in Feeding Bees Sweet Foods 



To ascertain if bees show preferences between sweet foods, the 

 following candies were made by using basswood honey with chemi- 

 cally pure potato starch, dextrine and the following sugars : saccha- 

 rine, mannose, levulose, dextrose, raffinose, lactose and maltose. An 

 equally small amount of honey was kneaded with 15 grams of each 

 of the above nine substances, except that only eight grams of sac- 

 charine were used. Each lump of candy was then divided into five 

 equal parts. In the order of the sweetest to the writer, the eight 

 sugars stand as given above. Saccharine, varying from 300 to 500 

 times as sweet as cane sugar, has a disagreeable sweet-sickening taste. 



