146 Psyche [October 
OBSERVATIONS ON T'HE SO-CALLED TRUMPETER IN 
BUMBLEBEE COLONIES.^ 
By 0. E. Plath, 
College of Liberal Arts, Boston University. 
About 250 years ago, the Dutch painter Goedart (1685) 
published a comprehensive treatise^ on insects, volume 2 of 
which contains a unique and probably the oldest account of 
the life-history and habits of bumblebees. The account seems 
to be based almost entirely on the author’s own observations, 
and is of interest chiefly because of its many naive anthropomor- 
phisms. Thus, for example, Goedart (pp. 242-245) states that 
the members of a bumblebee colony, besides keeping a ‘Ting” 
like the honeybees, also have another individual among them 
which mounts to the top of the nest each morning about 7 A. M., 
and, like the bugler in the army, calls his companions to work by 
rapidly vibrating his wings, thereby producing a noise not unlike 
that of a drum. This performance, according to Goedart (p. 245), 
lasted for about a quarter of an hour each morning, and was 
observed repeatedly, not only by him, but also by others. About 
seventy-five years later, Goedart’ s (1685) observation was con- 
firmed by the French Abbe Noel de Pluche (1764)^, but de 
Pluche (p. 185) found that the “drummer”, or “trumpeter”, 
which he had under observation, called his companions to work 
at 7.30 A. M., instead of 7. 
No one seems to have questioned this fantastic story until 
1742 (about 75 years after the story originated), when the great 
French engineer and entomologist, Reaumur (pp. 1-30), published 
his observations on bumblebees. Although this famous scientist 
had a large number of bumblebee colonies under observation, 
he was unable to discover any such behavior as that described 
iContributions from the Entomological Laboratory of the Bussey Institution, Harvard 
University, No. 225. 
2The first edition of this work appeared from 1662-1669, both in Dutch and in Latin. It 
was later also translated into English (1682) and French (1700). 
SAccording to Sladen (1912, p. 48), other editions of this work appeared as early as 1732. 
Translations into English (by Samuel Humphreys (1740), German (1746), and Spanish (1754), 
made this comprehensive work accessible to a large number of readers outside of France. 
