2G2 TflE BEE NATION. 



from the entrance stranger or robber-bees.* The bee- 

 masters, therefore, when they want two separate colonies or 

 the members of them to unite in one hive, sprinkle water 

 over the bee?, or stupefy them with some fumigating sub- 

 stance, so as to make them to a certain extent insensible to 

 smell, in order to attain their object. It is always possible 

 to unite colonies by making the bees smell of some strong- 

 smelling stuff such as musk. 



The remarkable memory of the bee is undoubtedly con- 

 nected witn the acuteness of this sense, which enables it to 

 find again the old foraging places, the tree or the flowers 

 where it has once found honey, and which make it possible 

 for it to recognise its own hive among many others. Huber 

 relates that one autumn he put some honey in a window to 

 which bees came in crowds. The honey was taken away 

 and the shutters remained shut all through the winter. 

 When they were reopened in the following spring the bees 

 also returned, although there was no honey in the window. 

 They, therefore, without doubt, remembered that which had 

 before stood there, and the lapse of many months had not 

 erased the impression. 



Stickney also relates a remarkable instance of bee-memory 

 (Kirby and Spence, loc. cit,, Vol. ii., p. 591) : " Some bees 

 which had taken possession of a hole under a roof, but were 

 removed into a hive, sent out scouts from their new home to 

 this hole for several years in the swarming season. The 

 remembrance thereof must therefore have been transmitted 

 from generation to generation, or communicated." In 

 similar fashion Karl Vogt (" Lectures on Useful and Harm- 

 ful Animals "), states that ants for year after year went 

 through several inhabited streets to the store-room of a 

 chemist 600 metres off, in which stood a large vessel always 

 filled with syrup. 



* According to the late investigations of Dr. 0. J. B. Wolff, in 

 Coswig, near Dresden, the smell of the bees does not lie in their feelers, 

 but in two special smell organs, situated near the pharynx, consisting 

 of 110 pairs of papillan to each of which goes a special nerve. The 

 insects allied to the bees, wasps especially, have only from 2040 

 pairs of these papillfe. So there we have the explanation of the won- 

 derfully fine smell of bees, and of many of their faculties, considered 

 inexplicable till now. Between the large compound eye and the root of 

 the upper jaw lies the mucilaginous gland of smell, which secretes the 

 mucous which increases the sensitiveness of the organ and keeps the 

 smell-papillae moist. 



