The Constant Bee

The bee, says Dr. Max Renner of the University of Munich, has a built-in time sense that ticks away, independent of all "environmental factors." To prove his point, Dr. Renner completed this week the first phase of an elaborate experiment in bee psychology.

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Karl von Frisch, topflight bee authority, thought of a way to test the bee's remarkable sense of time. He knew that if sugar water is offered to bees at a fixed hour, they will sally forth every day just in time to get it. They do not judge time by the sun, as was proved by putting the hive in an artificially lighted room, but there was a chance that some more subtle local influence might keep them on schedule.

Von Frisch decided that the way to eliminate all such influences, suspected and unsuspected, would be to train bees to feed at a definite hour and then move them quickly to a distant part of the earth. If they continued to feed by the local time of their old home, it would prove that they have a timekeeping mechanism as independent as a wrist watch.

The experiment was once difficult because ocean-going ships cannot move fast enough to carry bees a sufficient distance between daily feeding periods. Modern airliners can. This year Von Frisch's associates, Dr. Max Renner and Dr. Werner Loher, prepared for the great experiment. With the help of Dr. Theodore C. Schneirla of New York's American Museum of Natural History (Dr. Schneirla is an ant man, but he doubles in bees), they built two identical sunless bee-testing rooms: one in Paris, one in New York. Then they trained a hive of bees in Paris to feed from 8:15 to 10:15 p.m. Paris time.

The bees were put in a closed hive, loaded on a T.W.A. airliner and flown to New York. They completed their trans-ocean journey between feeding periods and were placed in the room that Dr. Schneirla had prepared for them.

Suspensefully, the scientists watched the hive. If the bees waited until 8:15 p.m., New York time, before feeding, it would mean that their time sense is controlled by something connected with their position on the earth. The bees did not wait. At 3:15 New York time, 8:15 Paris time, they swarmed out for their sugar water. This proved that their time sense is independent.

Now Dr. Renner has retrained his bees to follow a new feeding schedule on New York time. This week he flew them home to see if they take their U.S. mealtime back to Paris.

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