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The bee learns to associate accessible nectar with a certain spot on the flower marked by bright dots or lines, "honey-guides," and the chimpanzee that when a hen cackles there is an egg in the nest. But association is only the first lesson; inference and understanding follow. The child at kindergarten receives a few blocks. It admires and plays with them. Then it is taught to notice their form.
Variations in the honey-guides or in the pattern of color-designs might easily become injurious by deceiving insects, and such instances as the great variability of the spots on the corolla of some cultivated species of monkey-flowers, for instance, the Mimulus quinquevulnerus, could hardly be expected to occur in wild plants.
As numbers of my men frequently left the line of march in order to take out the korwes from their nests, or follow the honey-guides, they excited the astonishment of our guides, who were constantly warning them of the danger they thereby incurred from lions.
Investigation showed the same conditions in many other flowers, and the inference he drew was further strengthened by the remarkable discovery of his "honey-guides" in a long list of blossoms, by which the various decorations of spots, rings, and converging veins upon the petals indicated the location of the nectar.
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