INTELLIGENT BEHAVIOUR IN INSECTS 131 
to the incidence of the light. The search was, of course, 
fruitless, and a new nest was begun in this position. Presently 
the old nest was discovered, and was then vigorously destroyed 
in just the same way as the nest of a rival is pulled to pieces 
and scattered. Here a new incidence of light and new direction 
of shadows seemed to have completely transformed the visual 
situation. 
To return to insects, it is probable that the homing faculty 
is not the result of an inborn mysterious instinct dependent 
on some sense of direction of which we have no knowledge, 
but is based upon experience gained during their flight hither 
and thither—that, in a word, it is intelligent and not instinc- 
tive. Experiments of Fabre at first seemed to suggest some 
magnetic influence to which bees were sensitive; for when a 
minute magnet was fixed to a bee as it started on its return 
journey, the insect was at fault; but as a check experiment 
he affixed a piece of straw instead of a magnet, with similar 
results. Some of Fabre’s observations and those of Dr. 
Bethe* are difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that, in 
the homing, guidance is due to acquired acquaintance with 
the locality. But, on the other hand, the experiments of 
Lord Avebury and of Romanes seem to favour this view. 
Romanes found that when bees were taken inland from their 
hive near the seaboard, and then liberated, they returned 
from considerable distances, the whole locality being familiar ; 
but taken to the seashore, where the objects around them 
were unfamiliar (since the seashore is not the place where 
flowers and nectar are to be found), the bees, though not far 
distant from the hive, were nonplussed and lost their way. 
Dr. and Mrs. Peckham, as the result of their extremely careful 
observations, seem to have no doubt that the homing of solitary 
wasps is due to locality-experience ; and of the social wasp, 
Polistes fusca, they say:t ‘“ We have seen the young workers 
make repeated locality studies when they first began to venture 
* “Diirfen wir den Ameisen und Bienen psychische Qualitaten 
Zuschreiben.” Pfluger’s Archiv., 1xx., 1898. 
t “Solitary Wasps,” p. 219. 
