1G0 STATE POMOLOGICAI, SOCIETY. 



and talons of the eagle arc intended for catching, holding, and tearing prey. 

 Not honey hees, but little insects nearly akin, produce the galls on oak. The 

 oak kindly receives the egg, swells up a soft a succulent house and gives the 

 young worm an abundance of food. An insect lays an egg in the stem of a 

 golden-rod, or in the tip of a young stem of willow. A brush in one case, a 

 cone in the other is produced to nourish the young worm and feed and shelter 

 it to maturity. Whether these insects repay these plants for their kind recep- 

 tions I have not been able to find out. Paid or not paid, they have food 

 enough and to spare for these interesting little creatures. With small bladders, 

 the bladderwort is busy catching microscopic animals, and retaining them till 

 dead, and then slowly transferring the nourishing juices to the rest of the 

 plant. Here is cruelty even among humble plants. The queer common 

 pitcher plant of our swamps is supplied on the inside with spines pointing down- 

 wards. This is the case with numerous others on the continent. Some of 

 them prepare a honeyed secretion which grows more abundant until the lid or 

 open mouth of the pitcher is reached. Insects are enticed, lured on, like a tip- 

 ler in the dram shop, to the open mouth of destruction. Curiously constructed 

 lids make the mouth dark, and help to keep the insect from escaping. Most 

 of them cannot walk up the inside of the pitcher. They are drowned by the 

 liquid and devoured by the carnivorous plant. 



A few insects, among them a moth, is provided with sharp stiff spines on her 

 legs which act like stilts to enable her to walk up and down among the stiff 

 spines in the pitcher. In the pitcher plant of the southern swamps are thin 

 translucent spots towards which the insects are attracted instead of the open 

 mouth above, which is shaded by the overshadowing lid. This is one of nature's 

 cunning traps. The martynia plant and others catch and suck to death with 

 their sticky glands innumerable small insects. The Venus' fly trap of Caro- 

 lina, every one knows about, and very likely they have heard of the several 

 kinds of sun-dews which catch little flies with their glands. 



Honey is secreted in different organs of the flower. Sepals, petals, stamens, 

 pistils, and disk, each in different flowers is found to secrete nectar. By this 

 I mean that one kind of flower secretes honey with its petals, another kind by 

 sepals, and so on. Petals attract bees. Saunders, of Canada, cut off the pet- 

 als of raspberries, and by so doing made it difficult or impossible for the bees 

 to find the honey. Individual bees have been observed to behave differently 

 about flowers, in some respects, from a majority of bees. Some are eccentric. 

 They have their own peculiarities. Xageli put artificial flowers to branches, and 

 used essential oil on some, and on others he used no oil. The odor attracted 

 them to the flowers containing it. Aristotle, 2,000 years ago saw that hive bees 

 worked continuously on flowers of the same species. They even do so when the 

 flowers are not all colored alike, as in some plants in our flower gardens. By 

 this means they economize time. They get the hang of it. They learn how bet- 

 ter to make more rapid motions, and to make every motion count. The same 

 as is true of people who become expert in certain parts of any trade after much 

 practice in often repeating the same operation. In some cases, large numbers 

 of honey bees soon learn to glean after bumble-bees, where the latter have 

 made holes into the nectar. I have seen orioles pinching the tube of the Mis- 

 souri currant or yellow currant, to get the little honey from each flower. This 

 left a small hole which the bees were not slow to find, and frequently use as 

 long as the flower remained fresh. 



We have thus seen some of the diverse contrivances by which plants are 



