No. 510] COLOR SENSE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



347 



entomologist. A single example will suffice to show the 

 strength of the bee's memory for location. During Sep- 

 tember and the early part of October, while carrying on 

 various observations, I accustomed honey-bees to visit the 

 window of my library for honey and sugar syrup, and now 

 nearly a month and a half later, though they have not 

 been fed since, they still continue to return whenever 

 warmer weather permits. I have little doubt that when 

 the winter is past and they resume flight in April, as in 

 the experience of Huber, they will come again. I shall 

 certainly expect them. 



The great perseverance and power of observation ex- 

 hibited by bees, when searching for nectar in a locality 

 where they have previously procured it, is likewise well 

 illustrated by Forel's experiment. For more than three 

 hours they continued to look for the missing dahlia 

 flowers, until finally they detected a way to reach them 

 under the leaves. This acuteness of sense is also well 

 shown in the following experiment, which I performed 

 on October 6 after most of the natural flowers had 

 perished. 8 



I accustomed a number of bees to visit a red glass slide, 

 3 inches long by 1 inch wide, on the center of which was 

 a small quantity of honey The slide was placed in the 

 sunlight on the top of a white box about two feet high. 

 A second white box was then placed fifteen feet from the 

 first and to this the red slide was removed. A bee found 

 the honey at the end of six minutes and a few seconds 

 later another came. In ten minutes there were four bees. 

 During this interval the bees were continually flying 

 around the first white box. I now removed the second 

 white box but left the first undisturbed. An hour later 



•It is instructive to compare this experiment with one described by 

 Lubbock, where the attention of the bees was preoccupied. "I placed a 

 saucer of honey," he says, "close to some forget-me-nots, on which bees 



honey." ("Ants, Bees and Wasps," p. 280.) "Attention is surpris- 

 ingly developed in insects," says Forel, "often taking on an obsessional 

 character and being difficult to divert." ("Ants and Some Other In- 



