NO. 14 SENSE ORGANS ON MOUTH-PARTS OF BEE — McINDOO 39 



bees have likes and dislikes in regard to foods, the indications are that 

 bees have a sense more or less similar to our sense of taste. 



To ascertain whether the elimination of the olfactory pores on the 

 wings would produce any effect upon the ability of bees to discrim- 

 inate between foods, the wings of 20 workers were pulled off at their 

 articulations. Such an operation eliminates all the sense organs on the 

 wings, and the writer has previously shown that bees without wings 

 behave normally in all respects except that they respond more slowly 

 to odor stimuli. These 20 bees were fed pure cane-sugar candy and 

 cane-sugar candy containing- strychnine, as described on page 14. At 

 first a few ate a little of the poisoned candy, but after that not a single 

 bee was seen eating it, but they ate the pure cane-sugar candy nor- 

 mally. This indicates that when the 1500 pores on the wings are 

 prevented from functioning, the remaining 1200 pores found else- 

 where on a worker are sufficient to enable the bee to distinguish the 

 candy containing strychnine from the pure candy. These experi- 

 ments showed that further experimentation along this line was 

 useless. 



5. The Tactile Sense of the Honey Bee 



Since the innervated hairs herein discussed certainly cannot serve 

 either as olfactory or as gustatory organs, there still remain only two 

 known senses which we might consider in connection with these 

 hairs. (1) An auditory function has never been attributed to any 

 of these hairs, but similar hairs on spiders have been called auditory 

 hairs. We need not consider the sense of hearing further. (2) The 

 tactile sense seems to be the most plausible function to attribute to 

 them, although no experiments were performed to test this view. 



If we call these innervated hairs tactile hairs, we can easily explain 

 many of the activities of bees. Since bees are covered with a hard 

 chitinous integument, a person often wonders how it is possible that 

 they can perform their many duties of caring for the brood, building 

 comb, etc., unless they have an acute sense of touch. They certainly 

 cannot feel weak mechanical stimuli through the integument as we 

 do through the skin, and for this reason various kinds of hairs have 

 become innervated. 



Instead of the innervated hairs on the tongue being gustatory in 

 function, they are certainly used chiefly in examining food as to 

 whether it is solid or liquid. If the food should be solid and must 

 be dissolved before being eaten, these hairs perceive stimuli which 

 cause a copious flow of saliva. If the food should be a solid and 



