Natural History of the Honeybee. 5 



thirty to forty thousand individual odors united into a special hive odor, peculiar to this 

 colony alone; merely by the scooping together. The proof of this can be found in the 

 fact that a queen placed in such a colony can be set free frequently after only twelve to 

 twenty-four hours; she has taken up the hive odor. 



We see, therefore, in this case, a colony without a specific family odor conducting 

 itself exactly like colonies which are made up of the offspring of one mother. In each 

 case the hive odor is formed by the union and mixing of individual odors. 



Now the question arises: Is this hive odor inherited? No, surely not, for the hive 

 odor, therefore the common odor, that each individual can take up in an external way is 

 something purely exogenous or acquired. 



The power of the hive odor seems to me, therefore, to lie not in the inherent family 

 odor nor in the inherited individual odors, but in the exogenous mixture of the two. 

 What Bethe (1. c, p. 43) alleges for compound nests (Schuttelnester), and communicates 

 in his experiments on bees (p. 71), is not a contradiction of this. He says that bees 

 that had been transferred to another hive did attack almost not at all or with only slight 

 enmity their sisters remaining in the mother hive because the common family odor les- 

 sened the hostile reaction. This proves merely that the hive odor differs from the family 

 odor. If the latter were the predominant factor, bees of the same family would always 

 be friendly with each other, which is not the case. 



Further, I can not regard this, the only experiment which Bethe employed (1. c, p. 71), 

 as conclusive, since very many circumstances which have nothing to do with the hive odor 

 affect the friendly or hostile attitude of bees, be they sisters or strangers. The forage, 

 weather, time of year, strength of the colonies, quantity of provisions, etc., all have an 

 influence, as is well known to those who have studied the peculiarities of bees for many 

 years. In my experience, estrangement seems to take place between separated hive mates 

 generally much more quickly than Bethe states, yet I think this is on the whole a second- 

 ary matter which does not touch upon the principal point. 



MODIFICATION OF REACTIONS TOWARD THE HIVE ODOR. 

 It is contested by Bethe that the " various reactions" are based upon hive-mate and 

 hive-stranger modifications. 17 It seems to me that it is hardly possible to grant such a 

 far-reaching conclusion when Bethels investigations give no striking proof that reactions 

 toward the hive odor are incapable of modification. We learn nothing from the illus- 

 tration g^iven above. In the critical examination of robbing between colonies, we find that 

 a great number of factors enter, which can be discovered only after years of keen obser- 

 vation and fortunate circumstances. In the manual of bee instruction which I helped to 

 publish 18 (see p. 9), I recommended also fumigation of the hive of the robbing and not of 

 the robbed colony, but that is no proof that the hive stimulus can not be modified. Bethe 

 believes that no psychic elements enter into the actions of a colony and apparently the 

 short time he could devote to bees led him to this view. I submit the following investiga- 

 tions on this question. 



THE S WARMING-OUT OF A QUEEN LESS COLONY. 

 If two hives are placed close together, and the queen and brood are removed from 

 one, it sometimes happens that the entire colony, from which every possibility of rearing 

 a queen has been removed, will enter the queen-right 19 (weiselrichtigen) colony, humming 



17 "It has teen thought possille to make the individuals of a hive 'recognize' each other better by 

 fumigating the colony with some strong-smelling substance — Camphor, naphthaline, baldrian, for instance. 

 If this be done to a colony exposed to frequent plundering it is thought that the tees of this hive will 

 more readily detect the robbers to whom the scent does not adhere. Were this correct, then it would 

 prove that the various reactions toward hive mates and hive strangers could be artificially modified. 



"I believe that I can assert positively that such treatment does not increase the reaction toward 

 strange bees in the least, but only that the bees of all strange colonies react more vigorously toward the 

 individuals thus scented. (Therefore if it is desired to defend a colony from robbing, it is the robbing 

 and not the robbed which must be fumigated.) 



"We see, therefore, that here, as in ants, the various reactions toward hive mates and strangers bring 

 us back to a simple chemical reflex" (Bethe, 1. c, p. 71). 



18 G. Dathe, Lehrbuch der Bienenzucht, 5 Aufi., published bv R. Dathe and H. Keepen (v. Buttel- 

 Reepen), Bensheim, 1892, p. 181. 



19 There is no word in common use among English-speaking bee-keepers to indicate the normal con- 

 dition of a colony in the possession of a queen, either mated or i:nmated. It eeems desirable, therefore, to 

 translate the German term literally, although " queen'right " is an undenraHe term. It has already been 

 used by some American writers. — E. F. P. 



