Science: From Purdue

Entomologist Frank Eugene Lutz of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History has discovered that bees can see ultraviolet light. If the bee’s food receptacle is labeled with a card painted ultraviolet-white, the bee will soon learn to select that card among plain white cards which to the human eye seem indistinguishable from the one selected. No entomologist would use this visual faculty to lure to destruction the useful honey bee. But in Lafayette, Ind., scientists of Purdue University pondered ways of coping with the codling moth’, a mottled, foreshortened little creature whose larvae develop in apples and do U. S. agriculture $13,000,000 worth of damage each & every year. Finding that the moths preferred early evening for their egg-laying, Purduemen at that time put lights of various kinds and colors, including ultraviolet, in the apple trees and surrounded these lures with electrified grids. Last week they reported that the ultraviolet lights had accounted for by far the largest number of electrocuted codling moths.