Bees Can Tell The Time

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19130, 26 September 1936, Page 13

Bees Can Tell The Time

UOW do bees tell the time? Speaking at the Eastern and Home Counties' Convention of Beekeepers in Cambridge, England, .on September 1, ■Mr. ti. Illingworth said that one of the most interesting and humorous things about bees was that they had a sense of lime.

"If food is put out at a certain time every day," he said, "the bees will regularly appear, for they soon get to know'the time. Cease to feed them, and they will still turn up; but. after about six days they will gradually stop coming. "That their knowledge of time has nothing to do with the sun has been proved by experiment, but the feeding time must be tit. definite periods of the day. If food is placed for them at regular intervals, of, say, 19 hours, so that the period would differ each day, the bees would, still arrive at the usual hour."

In answer to the question. "Where does the bee keep its watch?" Mr. Illingworth said that the sense of time' did not come from hunger, but from the natural processes that go ion in the hotly.

There wen; certain drugs that accelerated or retarded these processes, and if the boos were given the. drugs they would be late or early. With their wonderful sense of time bees soon found out just the best time to visit certain flowers for nectar.