24 Natural History of the Honeybee. 



memory of locality leads them with infallible certainty back to the place they had impressed 

 upon themselves by the circling orientation. 



But why did these bees not fly back to the Institute if they possess such an infallible 

 sense of locality? For the simple reason that they were young bees which had not yet 

 developed their orientation by flying out, or perhaps old ones that had not taken their 

 orientation flight till to this spot. No one who is thoroughly familiar with the nature of 

 bees can have the slightest doubt about it. 72 



But because of these experiments and others, Bethe was forced to take this position 

 in formulating hia final conclusions: "The unknown force causes the bees to return to 

 the place from which they flew," and, therefore, to modify his earlier declaration that 

 they return "to the place in space where they are accustomed to finding the hive." The 

 box experiment can not explain both the habitual return to a dwelling and a single return 

 to a place. The return to the place from which they flew takes place in those bees which 

 returned to the box and not in those which did not "return to the place from which they 

 flew" but turned toward the Institute. I must confess that I find no logic in these con- 

 tradictory statements. 



Yet hear Bethe further: "I often repeated these experiments later. The further 

 away the bees were taken from the hive, the fewer returned to it; the more flew back to 

 the place from which they had flown. 73 I chose open fields for these experiments where 

 there were no large objects by which the bees might orient themselves optically. The 

 box was taken up immediately after the bees had flown out. I marked the place in the 

 grass accurately and stepped back a few steps. The bees returned with accuracy, and 

 made scarcely a mistake of more than a few decimeters. Many trod exactly upon the 

 spot. Often they stayed in the air for a minute, then returned. Once I noticed a bee 

 alight on some salvia in the meadow to take nectar there; then it flew away again and 

 then returned to the place from which it had flown. It was most startling to me when 

 I held the box open in the air until the bees had flown away and then stepped aside a few 

 steps. Four or six bees, after circling in the air, returned to the very spot where I had 

 held the box, making small circles at about the height of a man." 



I can only remark here that, even if there were not objects in the meadow optically 

 discernible to human eyes by which they could orient themselves, there may have been 

 innumerable landmarks for bees. No one will doubt this who knows anything about the 

 wonderful certainty (far surpassing human ability) with which bees in swift flight pick 

 out their own homes among hundreds of bee-hives placed close together and of bewildering 

 similarity. And if Bethe could manage without marking accurately the place "in the 

 air ' ' (which I must say to my shame I did not succeed in doing in my control experiments, 

 in spite of eyes which are sharper than ordinary), then the bees might have been able 

 to do it too. In order to give the bees the least possible clue (the height of a man) I did 

 not stand but lay down and noted approximately the large circles of searching bees in 

 the air in the direction of the place from which they had flown. I can, therefore, find no 

 support in the experiment of Bethe for an unintelligible "unknown force." Moreover, 

 a few other control experiments gave such interesting and divergent results that I must 

 enlarge further upon them. 



I let a few bees fly from a box placed on the short grass of a wide meadow, approxi- 

 mately five hundred meters from the apiary. I quickly stepped a few paces to one side, 

 greatly changing my position, as I did also in the following experiments. The bees 



72 1 might point out in this connection that we see an analogous condition in carrier pigeons. In 

 Prof. H. E. Ziegler's writing already cited, we find the following abstract, Ueber die Orientierung der 

 Brieftauben: "After all I have read and heard of the flight of carrier pigeons, I am of the opinion 

 that their orientation depends upon memory alone, and that it is unnecessary to ascribe it to a mysterious 

 sense of direction." If pigeons are taken away to a place where they no longer have any point of 

 orientation they take up various directions and some make mistakes. The fanciers' society will not 

 undertake to send out pigeons from a distance for which they are unprepared, for in that way there is 

 constantly a greater or less loss of good pigeons. "The pigeon- fancier drills his pigeons in established 

 routes, and thus takes them by degrees to places further away, always in one direction." Also, pigeons 

 tan orient themselves in fog and darkness just as little as bees can. 



73 This statement coincides excellently with, the foregoing statements against the existence of an 

 unknown force. The logical consequence from this assertion is that the "unknown force" compels bees 

 to fly in two different directions — to the hive and to the box ; the one here and the other there. This, 

 to be sure, can not be brought into harmony with what Bethe before considered the influence of the 

 unknown force, nor with the assertion that the "impulse to return to the hive is the strongest of all," etc. 



