April, 19 13. The Irish Nafuralisf. 65 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 
BY C. B. MOFFAT, B.A., M.R.I. A. 
(Read before the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club, nth February, 1913.) 
I was standing one day by a large bed of Wall -flowers, 
at which great numbers of the Honey -Bee were busy 
extracting honey. The Wall-flowers were of three colours — 
the three old-fashioned varieties with which everyone is 
most familiar : that is to say, the bright of ange -yellow, 
the deep mahogany brown, and the mixture of the two tints, 
brown streakings on yellow ground. Watching the bees, 
I was struck with the fact that every one of them was most 
particular in sticking to Wall-flowers of one colour, and 
neglecting both the other colours. A horticulturist who 
wanted to keep his varieties pure might have trusted the 
whole swarm of bees on that bed. There were crowds 
of bees at every colour — no preference whate.ver was shown 
for yellow or streaked or brown. But no bee that was 
working at brown left it for yellow or streaked ; no bee that 
was working at yellow took the shghtest notice of streaked 
or brown ; and no bee that was working at the streaked 
transgressed for a moment either to the uniformly brown 
or the uniformly yellow. 
Of course, I would have been surprised to see a bee — 
especially a Honey -Bee — fly from a Wall-flower to a 
flower of a different kind, or from a flower of a different 
kind to a Wall-flower. That would be a violation of the 
well-known bee-rule against mixing either the honey or 
the pollen of two different species of plant. The rule 
that a bee should confine itself to one kind of plant during a 
journey is followed — though not with the same degree of 
strictness — by every kind of bee with which I have any 
acquaintance ; and of course it must have had enormously 
beneficial results for the plants in securing the fertilisation 
of each flower with pollen of its own species. Not only bees 
but many other insects, and particularly the hawk-moths, 
follow the same rule, and so become important agents in 
A 
