208 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



this plant profitably except as we plant, or permit it to self -plant, every 

 year, and also that we get no honey till the second season from the seed. 



Another serious difficulty is the chance that the seeds may not come. I 

 planted five acres of seed this spring. The seed seemed excellent, the 

 ground was in fine condition, and we had frequent and abundant rai*ns. 

 Yet so few of the seeds came that I plowed all up and sowed to 

 buckwheat. 



We see, then, that the special planting for honey alone of the Echinops 

 is not encouraging. The fact that the plant is a biennial, that it is so 

 terrible to thresh, that the seed is likely to fail to germinate, and the fact, 

 if we may judge from analogy, that the plant may not always secrete 

 nectar, even though it bloom profusely — our experiments do not prove or 

 refute this point — all would tend to make the wise bee-keeper hesitate 

 before he grew this plant. It seems more than probable that it will never 

 pay to do so. 



THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN BEE PLANT. 



I had previously learned that to grow Cleome we must plant in autumn. 

 Spring-sown seed will rarely germinate. So in the fall of 1888 I sowed 

 eight acres of Cleome. The seed was procured fresh from Colorado. To 

 my great disappointment, the seed did not germinate well. In many places 

 the plants were exceedingly scattering. These plants were on sandy land. 

 Other seed was planted on clay and did not germinate nearly as well as 

 that sown on the sand. The blossoms commenced to open the first of 

 July, and continued to bloom even into September. The season was very 

 dry, the excessive drouth reaching from July till late autumn, just the 

 time for a Colorado plant to show its virtues. The plant (Fig. 2) grows 

 from one to three feet high, the foliage is smooth, the leaves compound, 

 and the flower an umbel. The flowerets commence to open below and 

 continue for a long time. 



To my great disappointment, the flowers seemed to furnish very little 

 nectar. The bees worked on the plants only occasionally and then not 

 excessively. Thus there were two disappointments: failure of the seeds to 

 germinate, and failure of the flowers to secrete. 



We sowed in 1889 three acres with seed of our own raising, which failed 

 almost entirely to germinate. We left three acres uncultivated where the 

 plants were thickest in 1889, to see if the plants would self-seed the ground. 

 Here, too, we were disappointed. There were so few plants, even though 

 the season seemed exceptionally favorable, that both pieces, the one 

 planted and the one supposed self-sown, were plowed up. 



