Sir John Lubbock read another amusing paper on ants and
bees on Thursday night at the Linnwan Society, in which he again brought forward evidence of the extreme industry of wasps, and the relative intellectual inferiority of bees to ants in the work of social co-operatibn. Ants, apparently, he thinks really co-operative creatures, though they are not very actively co-operative. He always found that when lie set on an ant to a group of but a few larvw, it did not invoke assistance to remove them to the nest, but if it were put to a much Larger group of larvee, as a rule, it did. The bees, on the contrary, never seemed to fetch their friends to any stock of honey, and not unfrequently a solitary ant preferred to do its work in solitude, and invoked no assistance, even for a great job of work. Perhaps the oddest of Sir John Lubbock's observations is the distinct preference of a bee which has once got honey off a paper of a particular colour for going back to a paper of the same colour, even though its place be changed, and though he finds a green paper now where there was a red one before. We suggest that it is due not to any preference for the colour, but to concentrativeness. The bee wants to finish the particular job he has begun before he attacks another, and the colour simply helps him to recognise the particular drop of honey on which he was engaged.
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