116 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



Fortunately the average hive of bees contains often as many 

 as fifty thousand workers. On each collecting trip the bee 

 visits at least ten flowers and the bees of a single hive must 

 daily call at some millions of blossoms. The honey-crop of 

 this country reaches the astonishing amount of nearly 130 

 million pounds annually. Some genius with a taste for figures 

 and some leisure time, may be inclined to figure out the number 

 of blossoms visited by the bees in their labors. He should not 

 forget to allow for the trips made for pollen and for the honey 

 to make into wax and for the honey consumed by the bees, and 

 for the water that must be evaporated out of the nectar, and 

 for — but this is enough for a start. 



Species Produced by Crossing. — In recent years we 

 have heard a great deal of Mendel's Law as applied to the 

 crossing of animals and plants. Briefly this law reads that 

 when two different species are crossed, the offspring tend to 

 resemble one of the parents to the exclusion of the other. By 

 breeding these offspring together, however, a second genera- 

 tion is produced. 25% of which resemble one grandparent 

 25% of which resemble the other grandparent and the remain- 

 ing 50% resembling their own parents in being mongrels or 

 hybrids. This second generation of hybrids if bred together 

 will give again 25% of one, 25% of another and 50% hybrids, 

 and so on apparenth^ for ever. Mendel's Law was first pub- 

 lished nearly fifty years ago but until recently received abso- 

 lutely no attention and it was commonly supposed that hybrids, 

 instead of having the capacit}* of producing pure species re- 

 sembling their own parents, were either sterile or only capable 

 of continuing the hybrid race. The re-discover}^ of Mendel's 

 law has caused scientists to go to the opposite extreme and to 

 apply the law to almost everything, but now comes Burbank 

 saying that in his work he has frequently crossed distinct spe- 

 cies and got therefrom, not a hybrid reproducing according to 

 Mendel's law, but a very distinct species in which the char- 



