Animal Intelligence Part 15

I have found, he says, that some bees are much more intelligent in this respect than others. A bee which I had fed several times, and which had flown about in the room, found its way out of the gla.s.s in a quarter of an hour, and when put in a second time came out at once. Another bee, when I closed the postern door, used to come round to the honey through an open window.

Bees seem to me much less clever in finding things than I had expected. One day (April 14, 1872), when a number of them were very busy on some barberries, I put a saucer with some honey between two bunches of flowers; these were repeatedly visited, and were so close that there was hardly room for the saucer between them, yet from 9.30 to 3.30 not a single bee took any notice of the honey. At 3.30 I put some honey on one of the bunches of flowers, and it was eagerly sucked by the bees; two kept continually returning till past five in the evening.

One day when I came home in the afternoon I found that at least a hundred bees had got into my room through the postern and were on the window, yet not one was attracted by an open jar of honey which stood in a shady corner about 3 feet 6 inches from the window.

One day (29th April, 1872) I placed a saucer of honey close to some forget-me-nots, on which bees were numerous and busy; yet from 10 A.M. till 6 only one bee went to the honey.

I put some honey in a hollow in the garden wall opposite the hives at 10.30 (this wall is about five feet high and four feet from the hives); yet the bees did not find it during the whole day.

On the 30th March, 1873, a fine suns.h.i.+ny day, when the bees were very active, I placed a gla.s.s containing honey at 9 in the morning on the wall in front of the hives; but not a single bee went to the honey the whole day. On April 20 I tried the same experiment, with the same result.

September 19.--At 9.30 I placed some honey in a gla.s.s about four feet from and just in front of the hive; but during the whole day not a bee observed it.

As it then occurred to me that it might be suggested that there was something about this honey which rendered it unattractive to the bees, on a following day I placed it again on the top of the wall for three hours, during which not a single bee came, and then moved it close to the alighting-board of the hive. It remained unnoticed for a quarter of an hour, when two bees observed it; and others soon followed in considerable numbers... . On the whole, wasps seem to me more clever in finding their way than bees. I tried wasps with the gla.s.s mentioned on p. 124 [_i.e._ the bell-jar], but they had no difficulty in finding their way out.

We shall now conclude this _resume_ of Sir John Lubbock's observations by quoting two other pa.s.sages bearing on the general intelligence of bees and wasps:--

The following fact struck me as rather remarkable. The wasp already mentioned at the foot of p. 135 one day smeared her wings with syrup, so that she could not fly. When this happened to a bee, it was only necessary to carry her to the alighting-board, when she was soon cleaned by her comrades. But I did not know where this wasp's nest was, and therefore could not pursue a similar course with her. At first, then, I was afraid that she was doomed. I thought, however, that I would wash her, fully expecting, indeed, to terrify her so much that she would not return again. I therefore caught her, put her in a bottle half full of water, and shook her up well till the honey was washed off. I then transferred her to a dry bottle and put her in the sun. When she was dry I let her out, and she at once flew to her nest. To my surprise, in thirteen minutes she returned, as if nothing had happened, and continued her visits to the honey all the afternoon.

This experiment interested me so much that I repeated it with another marked wasp, this time, however, keeping the wasp in the water till she was quite motionless and insensible. When taken out of the water she soon recovered; I fed her; she went quietly away to her nest as usual, and returned after the usual absence. The next morning this wasp was the first to visit the honey.

I was not able to watch any of the above-mentioned wasps for more than a few days; but I kept a specimen of _Polistes Gallica_ for no less than nine months.

This is the wasp which has already been alluded to under the heading 'Memory;' but it is evident that the capacity which the insect displayed of becoming tamed implies no small degree of general intelligence; its hereditary instincts were conspicuously modified by the individual experiences incidental to its domestication.

The remaining pa.s.sages that deserve quotation are the following:--

It is sometimes said of bees that those of one hive all know one another, and immediately recognise and attack any intruder from another hive. At first sight this certainly implies a great deal of intelligence.

It is, however, possible that the bees of particular hives have a particular smell. Thus Langshaft, in his interesting 'Treatise on the Honey-Bee,' says: 'Members of different colonies appear to recognise their hive companions by the sense of smell; and I believe that if colonies are sprinkled with scented syrup, they may generally be safely mixed. Moreover, a bee returning to its own hive with a load of treasure is a very different creature from a hungry marauder; and it is said that a bee, if laden with honey, is allowed to enter any hive with impunity.' Mr.

Langshaft continues, 'There is an air of roguery about a thieving bee which, to the expert, is as characteristic as are the motions of a pickpocket to a skilful policeman. Its sneaking look, and nervous, guilty agitation, once seen, can never be mistaken.'

It is, at any rate, natural that a bee which enters a wrong hive by accident should be much surprised and alarmed, and would thus probably betray herself.

On the whole, then, I do not attach much importance to their recognition of one another as an indication of intelligence.

Since their extreme eagerness for honey may be attributed rather to their anxiety for the common weal than to their desire for personal gratification, it cannot fairly be imputed as greediness; still the following scene, one which most of us have witnessed, is incompatible surely with much intelligence. The sad fate of their unfortunate companions does not in the least deter others who approach the tempting lure from madly alighting on the bodies of the dying and dead, to share the same miserable end. No one can understand the extent of their infatuation until he has seen a confectioner's shop a.s.sailed by myriads of hungry bees. I have seen thousands strained out from the syrup in which they had perished; thousands more alighting even upon the boiling sweets, the floor covered and windows darkened with bees, some crawling, others flying, and others still, so completely besmeared as to be able neither to crawl nor fly, not one in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten spoils, and yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless comers.

Pa.s.sing on now to the statements of other observers, Huber first noticed the remarkable fact that when beehives are attacked by the death's-head moth the bees close the entrance of their hive with wax and propolis to keep out the marauder. The barricade, which is built immediately behind the gateway, completely stops it up--only a small hole being left large enough to admit a bee, and therefore of course too small to admit the moth. Huber specially states that it was not until the beehives had been _repeatedly_ attacked and robbed by the death's-head moth, that the bees closed the entrance of their hive with wax and propolis. _Pure_ instinct would have induced the bees to provide against the first attack. Huber also observed that a wall built in 1804 against the death's-head hawk-moth was destroyed in 1805. In the latter year there were no death's-head moths, nor were any seen during the following. But in the autumn of 1807 a large number again appeared, and the bees at once protected themselves against their enemies. The bulwark was destroyed again in 1808.

Again, Huber (_loc. cit._, tom. ii., p. 280) gives a case of apparent exercise of reason, or power of inference from a particular case to other and general cases. A piece of comb fell down and was fixed in its new position by wax. The bees then strengthened the attachments of all the other combs, clearly because they inferred that they too might be in danger of falling. This is a very remarkable case, and leads Huber to exclaim, 'I admit that I was unable to avoid a feeling of astonishment in the presence of a fact from which the purest reason seemed to s.h.i.+ne out.'

A closely similar, and therefore corroborative case of an even more remarkable kind is thus narrated in Watson's 'Reasoning Power of Animals' (p. 448):--

Dr. Brown, in his book on the bee, gives another ill.u.s.tration of the reasoning power of bees, observed by a friend of his. A centre comb in a hive, being overburdened with honey, had parted from its fastenings, and was pressing against another comb, so as to prevent the pa.s.sage of the bees between them.

This accident excited great bustle in the colony, and as soon as their proceedings could be observed, it was found that they had constructed two horizontal beams between the two combs, and had removed enough of the honey and wax above them to admit the pa.s.sage of a bee, while the detached comb had been secured by another beam, and fastened to the window with spare wax. But what was most remarkable was, that, when the comb was thus fixed, they removed the horizontal beams first constructed, as being of no further use. The whole occupation took about ten days.

Again, Mr. Darwin's MS. quotes from Sir B. Brodie's 'Psychological Inquiries' (1854, p. 88) the following case, which is a.n.a.logous to the above, except that the supports required had to be made in a vertical instead of in a horizontal direction:--

On one occasion, when a large portion of the honeycomb had been broken off, they pursued another course. The fragment had somehow become fixed in the middle of the hive, and the bees immediately began to erect a new structure of comb on the floor, so placed as to form a pillar supporting the fragment, and preventing its further descent. They then filled up the s.p.a.ce above, joining the comb which had become detached to that from which it had been separated, and they concluded their labours by removing the newly constructed comb below, thus proving that they had intended it to answer a merely temporary purpose.

Similarly, Dr. Dzierzon, an experienced keeper of bees, and the observer who first discovered the fact of their parthenogenesis, makes the general remark,--

The cleverness of the bees in repairing perfectly injuries to their cells and combs, in supporting on pillars pieces of their building accidentally knocked down by a hasty push, in fastening them with rivets, and bringing everything again into proper unity, making hanging bridges, chains, and ladders, compels our astonishment.

Lastly, as still further corroboration of such facts, I shall quote the following from Jesse's 'Gleanings:'[65]--

Bees show great ingenuity in obviating the inconvenience they experience from the slipperiness of gla.s.s, and certainly beyond what we can conceive that mere instinct would enable them to do. I am in the habit of putting small gla.s.s globes on the top of my straw hives, for the purpose of having them filled with honey; and I have invariably found that before the bees commence the construction of combs, they place a great number of spots of wax at regular distances from each other, which serve as so many footstools on the slippery gla.s.s, each bee resting on one of these with its middle pair of legs, while the fore claws were hooked with the hind ones of the bee next above him; thus forming a ladder, by means of which the workers were enabled to reach the top, and begin to make their combs there.

Herr Kleine, in his pamphlet on Italian Bees and Bee-keeping (Berlin, 1855), says that on subst.i.tuting during the absence of the bees a hive filled with empty comb for their own hive, the returning bees exhibit the utmost perplexity. As the subst.i.tuted hive stands in the exact spot previously occupied by their own hive, the returning bees fly into it without observing the change. But finding only empty combs inside, 'they stop, do not know where they are, come out of the hole again without depositing their loads, fly off, look most carefully round the stand to a.s.sure themselves that they have made no mistake, and go in once more when convinced that they are at the right place. The same thing is repeated over and over again, until the bees at last bow to the incomprehensible and unavoidable, lay down their loads, and set to work at those tasks made necessary by the new circ.u.mstances of the hive. But as all the newly arriving bees behave in similar fas.h.i.+on, the disturbance lasts till late in the evening, and the uncertainty and anxiety of the bees is so great that the bee-master cannot contemplate it without deep sympathy.' Under such circ.u.mstances the bees take quickly to a subst.i.tuted queen; 'for the feeling of the first comers that they have no right to the new dwelling, having, as they suppose, made some inexplicable mistake which they cannot remedy, prevents them from feeling any hostility to the new queen which they find; they probably consider themselves as merely on sufferance, and feel that they should be grateful that no action is taken against them for their illegal entry, as generally happens in bee-experience.' Hence the writer adopts this device when he desires to exchange or subst.i.tute queens.

Buchner, after alluding to this case, supplements it with the following:--

The wind threw down from the stand of a bee-master--a friend of the author's, whose name will soon become known--a straw beehive, the inmates of which were surprised in full work, and no small disorder in the interior was the result. The owner repaired the hive, put the loose comb back in its place, and replaced it in such a manner that the wind could not again catch it, hoping that the accident would have no further results. But when he examined the hive a few days later, he found that the bees had left their old home in the lurch, and had tried to enter other hives, clearly because they could no longer trust the weather, and feared that the terrible accident might again befall them.

Dr. Erasmus Darwin, in his 'Zoonomia,' a.s.serts that bees, when transported to Barbadoes, where there is no winter, cease to lay up honey. In contradiction to this statement, however, Kirby and Spence say, 'It is known to every naturalist acquainted with the fact, that many different species of bees store up honey in the hottest climates, and that there is no authentic instance on record of the hive-bees altering in any age or climate their peculiar operations.'

On the other hand, more recent observation has shown that Dr. Darwin's statement is probably correct. For, according to a note in _Nature_,[66]

European bees, when transported to Australia, retain their industrious habits only for the first two or three years. After that time they gradually cease to collect honey till they become wholly idle. In a subsequent number of the same periodical (p. 411) a correspondent writes that the same fact is observable with bees transported to California, but is obviated by abstracting honey as the bees collect it.

There seems to be no doubt that bees and wasps are able to distinguish between persons, and even to recognise those whom they are accustomed to see, and to regard as friends. Bee-masters who attend much to their bees, so as to give the insects a good chance of knowing them, are generally of the opinion that the insects do know them, as shown by the comparatively sparing use of their stings. Again, many instances might be quoted, such as that given by Guerinzius,[67] who allowed a species of wasp native to Natal to build in the doorposts of his house, and who observed that although he often interfered with the nest, he was only once stung, and this by a young wasp; while no Caffre could venture to approach the door, much less to pa.s.s through it.[68] This power of distinguis.h.i.+ng between persons indicates a higher order of intelligence than we might have expected to meet with among insects; and, according to Bingley, bees will not only learn to distinguish persons, but even lend themselves to tuition by those whom they know. For he says, 'Mr.

Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a gla.s.s of wine with the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep; several fell into the gla.s.s, but did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array on a large table. Then he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word _march!_ they began to march in a very regular manner in rank and file, like soldiers. To these, his Lilliputians, he also taught so much politeness that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company which, at different times, resorted to admire this singular spectacle.'

Huber's observation, since amply confirmed, of bees biting holes through the base of corollas in order to get at the honey which the length of the corollas prevent them from reaching in the ordinary way, also seems to indicate a rational adjustment to unusual circ.u.mstances. For the bees do not resort to this expedient until they find from trial that they cannot reach the nectar from above; but having once ascertained this, they forthwith proceed to pierce the bottoms of all the flowers of the same species. From an interesting account by Mr. Francis Darwin[69]

(unfortunately too long to quote) it appears that, even when the nectar may be reached from above, bees may still resort to the expedient of biting through corollas in order to save time.

In connection with biting holes in corollas I may quote an observation communicated to me by a correspondent, Sir J. Clarke Jervoise. Speaking of a humble-bee, he says: 'I watched him into the flower of a foxglove, and, when out of sight, I closed the lips of the flower with my finger and thumb. He did not hesitate a moment, but cut his way out at the further end as if he had been served the same trick before. I never did it.'

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 s.p.a.ce, it would not only be directly harmful to individual bees, but would produce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 circ.u.mstances 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 following 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 circ.u.mstances, 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[70] that he once saw a snail enter a hive in this way. The hard sh.e.l.l was an effective protection against the stings of the bees, so the insects smeared round the edges of the sh.e.l.l with wax and resin, fastening down the animal to the wall of the hive, so that it died of starvation or want of air. If the encasing of an animal (such as a mouse) with propolis is not sufficient to prevent its putrefaction, the bees gnaw away all the putrescible parts of the carca.s.s and carry them out of the hive, leaving only the skeleton behind. The dead bodies of their companions are also carried out of the hive and deposited at a distance.

There is no question about this fact (which it will be remembered is a.n.a.logous to that already mentioned in the case of ants); according to Buchner, however, bees not only remove their dead, but also, occasionally at least, bury them. But as he gives very inadequate evidence in support of this a.s.sertion, we may safely set it aside as insufficiently proven.

Buchner, however, gives an admirable summary, and makes some judicious remarks on the well-known and highly remarkable habit which bees practise for the obvious purpose of ventilating their hives. As this account gives all the facts in a brief compa.s.s, I cannot do better than quote it:--

Very interesting, and closely connected with this characteristic of cleanliness, is the conduct of the so-called ventilating-bees, which have to take care that in summer or hot weather the air necessary for respiration of the bees in the interior of the hive is renewed, and the too high temperature cooled down. The latter precaution is necessary, not only on account of the bees working within the hive, to whom, as already said, a temperature risen beyond a certain point would be intolerable, but also to guard against the melting or softening of the wax. The bees charged with the care of the ventilation divide themselves into rows and stages in regular order through all parts of the hive, and by swift fanning of their wings send little currents of air in such fas.h.i.+on that a powerful stream or change of air pa.s.ses through all parts of the hive.

Other bees stand at the mouth of the hive, which fan in the same way and considerably accelerate the wind from within. The current of air thus caused is so strong that little bits of paper hung in front of the mouth are rapidly moved, and that, according to F.

Huber, a lighted match is extinguished. The wind can be distinctly felt if the hand be held in front.

The motion of the wings of the ventilating bees is so rapid that it is scarcely perceptible, and Huber saw some bees working their wings in this way for five-and-twenty minutes. When they are tired they are relieved by others. According to Jesse, the bees in very hot weather, in spite of all their efforts, are unable to sufficiently lower the temperature, and prevent the melting of some of the wax; they then get into a condition of great excitement, and it is dangerous to approach them. In such a case they also try to mend matters by a number leaving the hive and settling in large ma.s.ses on its surface, so as to protect it as much as possible from the scorching rays of the sun.

Although the described plan of ventilation is remarkable enough in itself, it is yet more remarkable in that it is clearly only the result of bee-keeping, and is evoked by this misfortune. For there could be no need of such ventilation for bees in a state of nature, whose dwellings in hollow trees and clefts of rocks leave nothing to be desired as to roominess and airiness, while in the narrow artificial hive this need at once comes out strongly. In fact, the fanning of the bees almost entirely ceased when Huber brought them into large hives five feet high, in which there was plenty of air. It follows, therefore, that the fanning and ventilating can have absolutely nothing to do with an inborn tendency or instinct, but have been gradually evoked by necessity, thought, and experience.

As the following observation on the cautious sagacity of wasps is, so far as I am aware, new, and as it certainly does not admit of mal-observation, I introduce it on the authority of a correspondent, the Rev. Mr. J. W. Mossman, who writes from Tarrington Rectory, Wragby. He found an apple in his orchard which had fallen from a tree in apparently good condition; but on taking it up observed that it was little more than a sh.e.l.l filled with wasps. Giving the apple a shake, he saw a wasp slowly emerging from a single small aperture in the rind:--