Linger Shall We With The Bees

I've been thinking about my humming little blog, Insectatext, that I should quickly add more entries about other insects. I have a nice collection on the ever-fascinating Cockroaches (order: Blattidae), for example. But as I've been reading about bees, I am forced to reconsider; why rush? There's no hurry. Let's linger among the honey bees a while.

Here von Frisch speculates on Bee Synaesthesia:

Owing to the presence of an entire forest of minute tactile hairs, which we may see dispersed between the olfactory pores, the feelers, known to be the bee's most important organs of smell, serve also as her most important organs of touch. Such a double function, if we only come to think of it, must have peculiar consequences. It certainly makes no difference to the human nose whether the object it smells is short or long, round or square. The odorous substances bring no information about the shape of the object by which they are emitted, when they reach the back of the nasal cavity. It is quite different with the bee, however. A bee, whose feelers, in the darkness of the hive, touch an object in order to examine it--be it a cell of the combs smelling of wax, a newly laid egg, or one of her grubs--is bound to perceive in the two different impressions of touch and smell in very close association. Bees may therefore be expected to perceive a smell "plastically".

--Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees, 1953, p.56