THE UNKNOWN WORLD.

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beasts in glass cases, to arrange insects in cabinets, and dried plants in drawers, is merely the drudgery and preliminary of study; to watch their habits, to understand their relations to one another, to study their instincts and intelligence, to ascertain their adaptations and their relations to the forces of nature, to realize what the world appears to them; these constitute, as it seems to me at least, the true interest of natural history, and may even give us the clue to senses and perceptions of which at present we have no conception.

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CHAPTER IX.

ON BEES AND COLORS.

IN my book on "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," I have recorded a number of observations which seemed to me to prove that bees possess the power of distinguishing colors-a power implied, of course, in the now generally accepted views as to the origin of the colors of flowers, but which had not up to that time been proved by direct experiment.

Amongst other experiments, I brought a bee to some honey which I placed on a slip of glass laid on blue paper, and about three feet off I placed a similar drop of honey on orange paper. With a drop of honey before her a bee takes two or three minutes to fill herself, then flies away, stores up the honey, and returns for more. My hives were about two hundred yards from the window, and the bees were absent about three minutes, or even less; when working quietly they fly very quickly, and the actual journeys to and fro did not take more than a few seconds. After the bee had returned twice, I transposed the papers; but she returned to the honey on the blue paper. I allowed her to continue this for some time, and then again transposed the papers. She

*"Ants, Bees, and Wasps," International Scientific Series. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.

EXPERIMENTS WITH COLORED PAPERS. 195

returned to the old spot, and was just going to alight, when she observed the change of color, pulled herself up, and without a moment's hesitation darted off to the blue. No one who saw her at that moment could have the slightest doubt about her perceiving the difference between the two colors.

I also made a number of similar observations with red, yellow, green, and white. But I was anxious to carry the matter further, and ascertain, if possible whether they have any preference for one color over another, which had been denied by M. Bonnier. To test this I took slips of glass of the size used for slides for the microscope, viz. three inches by one, and pasted on them slips of paper of the same size, coloured respectively blue, green, orange, red, white, and yellow. I then put them on a lawn, in a row, about a foot apart, and on each put a second slip of glass with a drop of honey. I also put with them a slip of plain glass with a similar drop of honey. I had previously trained a marked bee to come to the place for honey. My plan then was, when the bee returned and had sipped for about a quarter of a minute, to remove the honey, when she flew to another slip. This I then took away, when she went to a third, and so on. In this way, as

bees generally suck for three or four minutes, I induced her to visit all the drops successively before returning to the nest. When she had gone to the nest, I transposed all the upper glasses with the honey, and also moved the colored glasses. Thus, as the drop of honey was changed each time, and also the position of the colored glasses, neither of these could influence the selection by the bee.

In recording the results, I marked down successively

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EXPERIMENTS WITH COLORED PAPERS.

the order in which the bee went to the different coloured glasses. For instance, in the first journey from the nest, as recorded below, the bee lit first on the blue, which accordingly I marked 1; when the blue was removed, she flew about a little, and then lit on the white; when the white was removed, she settled on the green, and so on successively on the orange, yellow, plain, and red. I repeated the experiment a hundred times, using two different hives-one in Kent and one in Middlesex-and spreading the observations over some time, so as to experiment with different bees, and under varied circumstances.

I believe that the precautions taken placed the colors on an equal footing, and that the number of experiments is sufficient to give a fair average. Moreover, they were spread over several days, and the daily totals did not differ much from one another. The result shows a marked preference for blue, then white, then successively yellow, red, green, and orange. The red I used was a scarlet; pink would, I believe from subsequent observations, have been more popular. I may also observe that the honey on plain glass was less visited than that on any of the colors, which was the more significant because when I was not actually observing, the colors were removed, and some drops of honey left on plain glass, which naturally gave the plain glass an advantage.

Another mode of testing the result is to take the number of times in which the bee went first to each color, for instance, in a hundred visits she came to the blue first thirty-one times, and last only four; while to the plain glass she came first only five times, and last twenty-four times. It may be worth while to add that I by no means expected such a result.

DR. MÜLLER'S OBJECTIONS.

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A recent number of Kosmos contains a very courteous and complimentary notice of these observations by Dr. H. Müller, which, coming from so high an authority, is especially gratifying. Dr. Müller, however, criticizes some of the above-mentioned experiments, and remarks that, in order to make the test absolutely correct, the seven glasses should have been arranged in every possible order, and that this would give no less than 5040 combinations. I did not, however, suppose that I had attained to mathematical accuracy, or shown the exact degree of preference; all I claimed to show was the existence, and order, of preference, and I think that, as in my experiments the position of the colors was continually being changed, the result in this respect would have been substantially the same.

Dr. Müller also observes that when a bee has been accustomed to come to one place for honey, she returns to it, and will tend to alight there whatever the color may be; and he shows, by the record of his own experiences, that this has a considerable influence. This is so. Of course, however, it applies mainly to bees which had been used for some time, and were accustomed to a particular spot. I was fully alive to this tendency of the bees, and neutralized it to a considerable extent, partly by frequently changing the bee, and partly by moving the glasses. While, however, I admit that it is a factor which has to be taken into consideration, I do not see that it affords any argument against my conclusions. The tendency would be to weaken the effect of preference for any particular color, and to equalize the visits to all the glasses. This tendency on the part of the bees was, as my experiments show, overborne by the effect produced upon them