SIE J. LDBEOCK OX AKTS, BEES, AlfD WASPS. Hi 



iu less than leu minutes nearly a hundred ; the color therefore 

 must have been almost covered up. The presence of so many 

 bees would also attract their companions. Moreover, as the honey 

 was all removed in less than twenty minutes, the bees were evi- 

 dently working against time. They were like the passengers iu 

 an express train, turned hurriedly into a refreshment room ; and 

 we cannot exp)ect that they would be much influenced by the 

 coloring of the tablecloth. In fact, the experiment was too 

 hurried and the test not delicate enough. 



Then, again, he omitted blue, which I hope to show is the 

 bees' favourite color ; and his cubes were all colored. It is true 

 that one was green ; but any one may satisfy himself that a piece 

 of green paper on grass is almost as conspicuous as any other 

 color. To make his experiment complete, M. Bonnier should 

 have placed beside the honey on the colored cubes, a similar 

 suppl}- without any accompaniment of color to render it con- 

 spicuous. 



I could not, therefore, regai'd these experiments as at all 

 conclusive. The following experiments seem to me a more fair 

 test : — 



I took slips of glass of the size generally used for slides for the 

 microscope, viz. 3 inches by 1, and pasted on them slips of paper 

 coloured respectively blue, green, orange, red, white, yellow. I 

 then put them on a lawn, in a row, about a foot apart, and on each 

 put a second slip of glass with a drop of honey. I also put with 

 them a slip of plain glass with a similar drop of honey. I had 

 previously trained a marked bee to come to the spot for honey. 

 My plan then was, when the bee returned and had sipped about 

 for a quarter of a minute, to remove the honey, when she flew to 

 another slip. This then I took away, when she went to a third ; 

 and so on. - In this way I induced her to visit all the drops suc- 

 cessively. When she had returned to the nest, I transposed all 

 the upper glasses with the honey, and also moved the colored 

 glasses. Thus, as the drop of honey was changed each time, and 

 also the position of the colored glasses, neither of these coidd 

 influence the selection by the bee. 



In recording the results I marked doAvn successively the order 

 in which the bee went to the diflierent colored 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 

 disturbed from the blue, she flew about a little and then lit on 

 the white; when the white was removed, she settled on the 



