Bee Behaviour A particularly interesting item in the 1951 report
of the Rothamsted Experimental Station at Harpenden covers the findings of Dr. C. G. Butler, of the Bee Department, working on the importance of perfume in the discovery of food by the worker honey-bee. " Worker honey- bees," Dr. Butler states, " have an inherent tendency to associate cer- tain perfumes with food. This results in untrained scouting bees being attracted to certain kinds of flowers such as hawthorn and wild white clover, which they have never visited before. If the perfume of a crop of newly-opened flowers is sufficiently powerful it sometimes attracts scouting bees from a considerable distance away. But norm- ally, a bee has to approach to within a few centimetres of a mouth of a flower before she can appreciate its perfume. If a bee has learned to associate a particular perfume with a particular group of flowers she will seldom enter any flower in the group unless she can smell its perfume. When a bee is attracted towards a flower or flower-like object and approaches it closely, any attractive perfume it may possess tends to act as a stimulus to further exploration, which may involve settling on the object and possibly extending her tongue and seeking food in any small crevice in or around the object. In general, the results obtained with untrained bees support the conclusions reached by von Frisch in 1919 in his work with trained bees and suggest that both of these categories of bees behave in a similar way when seeking food."
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