290 SENSE OF HEARING. 
The Sense of Hearing. 
August 29.—The result of my experiments on the 
hearing of bees has surprised me very much, It is 
generally considered that to a certain extent the 
emotions of bees are expressed by the sounds they 
make,! which seems to imply that they possess the 
power of hearing. Ido not by any means intend to 
deny that this is the case. Nevertheless I never found 
them take any notice of any noise which I made, even 
when it was close to them. I tried one of my bees 
with a violin. I made all the noise I could, but to my 
surprise she took no notice. I could not even see a 
twitch of the antenne. The next day I tried the same 
with another bee, but could not see the slightest sign 
that she was conscious of the noise. On August 31 I 
repeated the same experiment with another bee with 
the same result. On September 12 and 13 I tried 
several bees with a dog-whistle and a shrill pipe; but 
they took no notice whatever, nor did a set of tuning- 
forks which I tried on a subsequent day have any more 
effect. These tuning-forks extended over three octaves, 
beginning with a below the ledger line. I also tried 
with my voice, shouting, &c., close to the head of a bee; 
but, in spite of my utmost efforts, the bees took no 
notice. I repeated these experiments at night when 
the bees were quiet; but no noise that I could make 
seemed to disturb them in the least. 
‘ See, for instance, Landois, Zeits. f. wiss. Zool. 1867, p. 184 
