R-U5N 



U/2U/31 



industry as is the old field Dee# tele duty of the field bees is to gather 

 nectax and pollen, and this they do with everlasting energy from the first 

 break of dawn until the last rays of the setting sun. The duties of the nurse 

 bees are many and, strangely enough, no one nurse bee seems to finish any job 

 it starts. It will start one thing, then switch off to something else, then 

 go on to another Job. The nurse bees as individuals apparently work in a hap- 

 hazard way that vTould be the despair of any efficiency expert. The marvel, 

 however, is that for all these, what most of us might call "slipshod methods," 

 the work of the hive goes smoothly on with perfect harmony at all times. 

 Traffic jams caused by many bees wanting to do the same thing at the same time 

 are unloiown. It is only through the marvelous perfection of its organization 

 that a colony of bees can gather the nectax from the countless flowers and 

 convert it into honey, a food which is as good as it is old, and which has 

 graced the tables of our forbears since the creation of time. 



But in slack seasons, our famous bu^iy bees easily acquire the habit of 

 stepping from the straight and narrow path of honest industry. They turn 

 robbers. Bandit bees from strong colonies force their way into the hives of 

 weaker colonies, and overcome the guards at the door, drive out the weaker 

 bees, and seize their stores. 



Mr. riambleton was also telling me of a bee-keeper who went away and left 

 a little honey house filled with honey in his yard. Knowing that bees will 

 find their way even through a key-hold, he stopped up the key-hole. It was 

 still stopped up when he got back, but when he opened the door, the honey was 

 gone. The mystery was soon solved. The bee burglars had entered by way of 

 the chimney. That shows you what a keen sense of smell bees have. 



In fact, their sense of smell seems to be the bee's main reliance inside 

 the hive. The gioaxd bees at the hive entrance are able to detect the xndits 

 by their odor. Th&t is not because robbers are in bad odor, but because each 

 bee colony has a distinctive smell readily recognized by the bees from any other 

 colony. And the queen bee, who is virtually a prisoner of the workers rather 

 than the head of the government, has an odor peculiar to herself. In fact, 

 these various odors are apjjarently highly important in determining the instinc- 

 tive reactions of the bees in the hive. There is no head, no boss, no ruler; 

 but take away the queen, and the change is promptly discovered by the change 

 in odor within the hive. 



However, don't imagine that bees rely altogether on their sense of 

 smell. Their sense of sight seems to be highly useful in hunting for the 

 flowers from which they get the nectar and pollen which they carry to the hive. 



Mr. Ilambleton says that experiments performed at the bee cultuire labora- 

 tory show that bees have a very marked sense of color, which is remarlcably like 

 our own, within the range of colors our eyes can see. But bees can see beyond 

 the range of humaji eyes. Within our visible range, they prefer the yellow-green 

 as we do. But they can see ultra-violet light rays we can not see. Since many 

 flowers reflect ultra-violet light from their surface, Mr. Ilambleton holds that 

 the bees' ability to see in the ultra-violet may be an important guide to them 

 in selecting flowers for their nectar supply. 



