190 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
Bees are highly particular in the matter of keeping 
their hives pure, and their sanitary arrangements often 
exhibit intelligence of a high order. 
The following is quoted from Buchner {loc. cit ., p. 
248 ):— 
Impure air within the hive is that which the bees must 
above all things fear and avoid, for with the pressure together 
of so many individuals in a comparatively small space, it would 
not only be directly harmful to individual bees, but would pro- 
duce among them dangerous diseases. They therefore also never 
void their excrements within, but always outside the hive. 
While this is very easy to do in summer, it is, on the contrary, 
very difficult in the winter, when the bees sit close together 
and generally motionless in the upper part of the hive, and 
when, from impure air and foul evaporations, as well as from 
bad and insufficient food, dysentery-like diseases break out 
among them, and often carry off the whole community in a brief 
space of time. In such cases they utilise the first fine day to 
relieve themselves, and in the spring they take a long general 
cleansing flight. But they also know how to take advantage of 
special circumstances so as to perform the process of purification 
in the way least harmful to the hive. Herr Heinrich Lehr, of 
Darmstadt, a bee-keeping friend of the author, has sent the fol- 
lowing communication : — During an epidemic of dysentery in 
winter, from which most of his hives suffered (as the bees were 
no longer able to retain their excrements), one hive suffered less 
than the others. Exact investigation showed that this hive was 
soiled all over at the back with the excrement of the bees and 
that the inmates had here made a kind of drain. On this spot 
a little opening had been made by the falling off of the covering 
clay, which led directly to the upper part of the hive, where the 
bees were accustomed to sit together during the winter. This 
excellent opportunity, whereby they could reach in the shortest 
way an otherwise difficult object, and one rendered complicated 
by circumstances, did not escape them. 
It sometimes happens that mice, slugs, &c., enter 
a beehive. They are then killed and covered with a 
coating of propolis. Reaumur says 1 that he once saw a 
snail enter a hive in this way. The hard shell was an 
effective protection against the stings of the bees, so the 
insects smeared round the edges of the shell with wax and 
1 See Kirly and fyence, vol. ii., p. 229. 
