12 



BULLETIN 1339, U. S. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



of the colonies headed by such queens, merely because of lack of suffi- 

 cient bees; but this does not indicate any reduction in the propensities 

 to gather of the individual bees. Merrill (24) reaches the same conclu- 

 sion in his study of changes in colony weight. Whatever slight dif- 

 ferences occur in the propensity of individual bees or colonies of bees 

 to gather nectar and ripen honey are presumably due to actual anatom- 

 ical differences rather than to marked differences in instinctive activ- 

 ities. 



Table 1 gives the hourly changes in weight of colonies 1 and 2 for 

 13 consecutive days in 1923. The two colonies respond to external 

 stimuli with remarkable similarity hour by hour. Every break in 



s&W 





s?AS 



Fig. 4.— Hourly changes in weight of colonies 1 and 2, May 21 and 22, 1923. The shaded portion represents 

 the gains and losses of colony 1 superimposed on those of colony 2. The black areas show the excess of 

 the gain or loss of colony 2 over that of colony 1. (From Table 1.) 



the weight graph of one colony is almost exactly duplicated in that 

 of the other. Figure 4 represents graphically the weights of colony 

 1 superimposed on those of colony 2 for May 1 and May 22. The 

 hourly differences in weight between the two are practically identical. 

 So far as the amount of gain is concerned, colony 2 is the stronger, 

 but the two behave almost the same from hour to hour. Figure 5 rep- 

 resents the average changes in weight hour by hour for the three 

 colonies (one in 1922 and two in 1923) during the May honey flow. 

 The similarity of these changes in weight of the three colonies is 

 strikingly apparent, despite the fact that the data of colony AB were 

 collected in May, 1922, and those of colonies 1 and 2 in May, 1923. 



