Getting two arduinos talking over Xbee series 1

I have a potentiometer (successfully converted to linear) being read in to one arduino, and the value sent via serial to my pc.

I have now got it to send the value via xbee series 1 to the XCTU console on the PC (not very hard)

Now I want to put the other xbee onto another arduino, and see this recieving the value by printing out to serial again (on a different port obviously)

This is sort of working, but I'm getting basically random numbers. I can see values 0-1023 being printed to console when im moving the pot on the sender, but the numbers coming out of the reciever are like between 0-50, they do change when i move the pot but its seemingly random. THis is also the same when i just plug 2 wires into the tx/rx of each xbee.

What further steps should I take to get this to work? I've using 2 arduino Duemilanove, 2 xbee series 1, and 2 xbee shields