No. 527] COLOR SENSE OF THE HONEY-BEE 691 



was black, green, white, blue, orange, purple, yellow. On 

 its ninth visit the bee returned to the red ; on the tenth to 

 the green, then going to red and white, but finally coming 

 back to the green. On its eleventh and twelfth visits the 

 bee returned to the blue. I transposed the blue with the 

 yellow and the red with the purple so that the order of 

 the colors was black, purple, green, white, yellow, orange, 

 red, blue. The thirteenth and fourteenth visits were 

 made to the yellow, the fifteenth to the white, the six- 

 teenth and seventeenth to the yellow, the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth to the blue — on the last visit it was disturbed 

 by a wasp and went to the orange. The twentieth visit 

 was to the yellow, the twenty-first to the green, and the 

 twenty-second to the yellow. 



It is evident that at the beginning of this experiment 

 the behavior of the bee was widely different from what 

 it was at its close. Habituated to visit the blue slide, it 

 continued constant to this slide or the allied purple dur- 

 ing its earlier visits; though again and again by means of 

 its visual and olfactory senses it examined and compared 

 the other slides, as has been described. Repeated trans- 

 positions of the blue paper gradually weakened its fidelity 

 to this color, until at last similarity of form, honey and 

 odor prevailed over dissimilarity of color, and the bee 

 visited the slides indiscriminately. This result might 

 also have been brought about by permitting the bee to 

 remove all the honey from the blue slide, when it would 

 have turned from necessity to one of the other colors. 

 This is no doubt what happens in nature. A bee I'm. Is 

 usually in one flower only a portion of its load of nectar, 

 and so is compelled to examine other blossoms, which, if 

 they are alike in form, it will soon visit without order 

 even though they differ in color. If there are a number 

 of bees, their efforts to avoid visiting the same slide or 

 flower will greatly hasten the breaking down of the color 

 barrier. In a location frequented by a few bees for honey 

 I put out the following series of colors : white, blue, green, 

 black, red orange, purple. In a few minutes there was a 



