The Life of the Individual 
123 
“The next day other searchers came. The seven marked 
bees continued their visits. I took some pollen from the 
stamens of Lycium and put it in a mass below the nectar of 
one flower. When bee ‘C’ arrived at that flower, she 
stretched out her proboscis as usual to suck up the sweet 
liquid but saw that it was not there and that something 
different was in the flower; she examined it carefully for 
more than a minute, did not collect the pollen but renounced 
it and went to pump nectar in the neighboring flowers. I 
made the inverse experiment and bathed the pollen of one 
flower in nectar; ‘F,’ after pollen, came to this flower, 
found the sweet liquid on the anthers, examined it, did not 
touch the anthers of that flower, but renounced it and went 
to continue her collecting on the neighboring flowers.” 
Bonnier further found that certain bees confined their 
visits to a certain limited portion of a row of plants which 
were all in bloom. He concludes as follows: “They thus 
accomplish on the whole, the collection of the most in the 
least possible time of the substances necessary to all colonies 
of bees in the same region.” 
If division of labor as described by Bonnier is even par¬ 
tially true, it may help us to understand why it happens 
that the flowers visited on a single trip are usually of one 
species. It is to be hoped that these interesting observations 
may be repeated by other investigators. 
Pollen gathering. 
Pollen is carried to the hive in the pollen baskets or cor- 
biculie (Fig. 63) situated on the outer surface of the tibiae of 
the third pair of legs. The activities of the bees in collect¬ 
ing pollen have been admirably described by Casteel. 1 In 
collecting from a flower, the worker not only secures pollen 
on its mandibles and tongue but also on the hairs of the legs 
the visit is disturbed by the arrival of wild Hymenoptera as numerous.” 
— Bonnier. 
1 Casteel, D. B., 1912. The behavior of the honey bee in pollen collect¬ 
ing. Bui. No. 121, Bureau of Entomology, 36 pp. 
