. The bee and white ants, their manners and habits; with illustrations of animal instinct and intelligence. Bees; Instinct; Termites. ANECDOTES OF ANTS AND BEES. this knowledge, they afterwards constantly proceeded at once to the most direct mode of obtaining the honey; so that he could always distinguish hees that had been old visitors of the flowers from new ones, the latter being at a loss how to proceed, while the former flew at onoo to their Fig. 16.âTbe Humble Beo. 64. A similar fact is related of the hmnble bees by Huber,* who, when their bodies are too large to enter the corol
. The bee and white ants, their manners and habits; with illustrations of animal instinct and intelligence. Bees; Instinct; Termites. ANECDOTES OF ANTS AND BEES. this knowledge, they afterwards constantly proceeded at once to the most direct mode of obtaining the honey; so that he could always distinguish hees that had been old visitors of the flowers from new ones, the latter being at a loss how to proceed, while the former flew at onoo to their Fig. 16.âTbe Humble Beo. 64. A similar fact is related of the hmnble bees by Huber,* who, when their bodies are too large to enter the corolla of a flower, cut a hole at its base with their mandibles, through which they insert the proboscis to extract the honey. If these insects adopted this expedient from the first, and invariably followed it, the act might be ascribed to instinct; but as they have recourse to it only after having vainly tried to introduce their body in the â usual way into the opening of the corolla, it can scarcely be denied that they are guided by intelligence in the attainment of their end. The marks of experience, memory, and comparison, are unequivocal. "When they find their efibrts to enter the first flower to which they address themselves fruitless, they do not repeat them upon other flowers of the same sort, but directly attack the base of the corolla. Huber witnessed such pro- ceedings repeatedly in the case of bean-blossoms. 65. Insects give proofs without number of the possession of the faculty of memory, without which it would be impossible to turn to account the results of experience. Thus, for example, each bee, on returning from its excursions, never faib to recognise its own hive, even though that hive should be surrounded by various others in all respects simUar to it. 66. This recognition of home is so much the more marked by traces of inteUigenoe rather than by those of instinct, inasmuch as it depends not on any character merely connected with the * Philosophical Transa
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