EXPERIMENTS WITH BEES

Evening Star, Issue 23113, 12 November 1938, Page 8

EXPERIMENTS WITH BEES

Dr Mathilde Hertz, the daughter of the discoverer of Hertzian waves, is at work in Cambridge at the Entomological Field Station. She begins work every morning at 9 o’clock, and as true to time as if they were catching a train a number of bees turn up for their sugar and water. Dr Hertz says that bees are deaf and therefore cannot hear the clocks striking, so they must have some time sense of their own. To prove this she started another set of experiments at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and found that the bees also were true to time. Colour experiments show that bees are unable to see red, but can see beyond the violet end of the spectrum where our vision fails to follow. Dr Hertz places coloured sheets of paper under glass, and finds that her bees alight over the green but take no notice of the red. Shape seems to have some meaning for bees, because they like curved and complicated figures, but avoid plain squares and circles.