Читать книгу Insect Adventures - Fabre Jean-Henri - Страница 12

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I wished to know something more about my Mason-bees. I had heard that they knew how to find their nests even if carried away from them. One day I managed to capture forty Bees from a nest under the eaves of my shed, and to put them one by one in screws of paper. I asked my daughter Aglaé to stay near the nest and watch for the return of the Bees. Things being thus arranged, I carried off my forty captives to a spot two and a half miles from home.

I had to mark each captive with a mixture of chalk and gum arabic before I set her free. It was no easy business. I was stung many times, and sometimes I forgot myself and squeezed the Bee harder than I should have. As a result, about twenty out of my forty Bees were injured. The rest started off, in different directions at first; but most of them seemed to me to be making for their home.

Meanwhile a stiff breeze sprang up, making things still harder for the Bees. They must have had to fly close to the ground; they could not possibly go up high and get a view of the country.

Under the circumstances, I hardly thought, when I reached home, that the Bees would be there. But Aglaé greeted me at once, her cheeks flushed with excitement:

“Two!” she cried. “Two arrived at twenty minutes to three, with a load of pollen under their bellies!” I had released my insects at about two o’clock; these first arrivals had therefore flown two miles and a half in less than three quarters of an hour, and lingered to forage on the way.

As it was growing late, we had to stop our observations. Next day, however, I took another count of my Mason-bees and found fifteen with a white spot as I had marked them. At least fifteen out of the twenty then had returned, in spite of having the wind against them, and in spite of having been taken to a place where they had almost certainly never been before. These Bees do not go far afield, for they have all the food and building material they want near home. Then how did my exiles return? What guided them? It was certainly not memory, but some special faculty which we cannot explain, it is so different from anything we ourselves possess.