File:British bee journal and bee-keepers adviser (1901) (19793437264).jpg

Title: British bee journal & bee-keepers adviser
Identifier: britishbeejourna1901lond (find matches)
Year: 1873 (1870s)
Authors:
Subjects: Bees
Publisher: London
Contributing Library: UMass Amherst Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries

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152 THE BRITISH BEE JOURNAL. (April Us, 1901. queen from one of my nuclei into a wire- cloth cage with twelve workers. "6.30. I went to the cage and shook it. All the workers hummed and protruded mem- brane. A very sweet odour was noticeable, coupled with " seaweed odour—sweet odour more noticeable. " 10.30. When quiet I fed the bees with a drop or two of syrup, and opened cage. Four or five bees were standing round queen with membranes exposed, wings standing out ; some vibrating feebly almost Without sound. Some bees got out. " 10.45. One bee dropped on to the floor, and ran about as if searching for something. I held cage, with queen and workers in it, near her. She did not notice the cage for a long time. The bees in the cage hummed occasion- ally. This did not perceptibly attract her more. After five minutes' searching, when the bees were quite silent, she discovered her proximity to them. She was then fully l£ in. off. She exposed her membrane, elevated her abdomen, and hummed. Other bees did not follow suit. She continued humming for about ten minutes, gradually working nearer till she reached cage, then she ran over it and tried to get in." The membrane in question appears to have been first noticed so long ago as the year 1883, when Nassonoff, a naturalist of Moscow, described the organ, and an account of his description was sent by Zoubareff to the Swiss Bulletin d? Apiculture (translated by Mr. Frank Benton in the British Bee Journal of Dec. 15, 1883). The organ is described as a canal. " At the bottom of this canal a large num- ber of small glands open, each one of which has an oval cell with a well- defined globule. From each cell a fine duct starts out and extends to the bottom oi the canal. Nas- sonoff further says that the walls of the ducts are of a chitinous tex- ture. He assigns a secretory function to the glands, sug- gesting that they produce the per- spiration. Zoubareff, while not absolutely rejecting Nassonoff's theory, connects the existence of the glands with the little drops of liquid that bees were said to let fall when they are on the wing, which, he says,
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FIC4. 2. Nassonoff's organ as figured by Zoubareff in 1S83. Lettering same as in fig. 1. represent the excess of moisture which nectar, freshly gathered from flowers, contains over ripened honey, and which, he thinks, is col- lected and thrown off by these glands. These ideas seem very crude, and would hardly be believed at the present time, but they are copied in the present edition of Cowan's " Honey-Bee," which seems to indicate that the organ in question has not been further investigated since 1883. I have constructed a special stage to my microscope which holds a bee's abdomen in a distended condition, enabling me to examine the surface of this organ under a high power. It then has the appearance of being paved with a mosaic of minute semi-transparent vesicles (b, fig. 1). At the outer margin of the vesicular area is a long hollowed-out depression (c). From the above notes it seems clear that the organ under consideration is connected very closely with the means that bees have of attracting one another. There is strong evidence in favour of its being a secretory organ. This being the case, it seems but natural to suppose that it produces some kind of scent by which bees are attracted to one another. This theory i3 strengthened by the fact that we know that bees are greatly in- fluenced by scents some of which we can hardly perceive. They can smell honey and syrup far better than we can. There can be no doubt that the antenna* are the principal organs of smell in insects generally. Lefebvre so far back as 1838 made experiments on bees which seemed to assign the organs of smell to certain pits in the antenna*, and this is the theory now generally held. On the other hand, no certain organs of hearing have been found in bees. Sir John Lubbock (now Lord Avebury) says in " Ants, Bees, and Wasps" (page 290): " The result of my experiments on the hearing of bees has surprised me very much. It is generally considered that to a certain extent the emotions of bees are expressed by the sounds they make, which seems to imply that they possess the power of hearing. I do not by any means intend to deny that this is the case. Nevertheless, I never found them take any notice of any noise which I made even when it was close to them." Lord Avebury goes on to say that he tried his bees with a violin, dog-whistle, tuning-fork extending over three octaves, shouting, &c, all to no purpose. Lord Avebury was, on the con- trary, very successful with his experiments testing the sense of sight and smell in bees. Forel, an eminent authority on ants, denies that these insects can hear. My experiments with bumble-bees have indicated a similar conclusion in their case. While the evidence regarding the absence of the sense of hearing in bees is entirely negative in character, one must not declare positively that they cannot hear ; and they are, at any rate, extremely sensitive to certain forms of vibration. It is possible that the membrane we have been

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