QUEER FLOWERS. 179 



at some of tlie peculiar blossoms wLicli appeal rather to the senses and 

 sensibilities of other and more original insect guests. 



The wasp, though undoubtedly an irascible and ill-balanced creat- 

 ure, and a chauvinist of the fiercest description, is yet a person of far 

 more width of mind and far wider range of experience in his own way 

 than the home and conventional bee. His taste, in fact (like the taste 

 of that hypothetical person, the general reader), is quite omnivorous : 

 while he does not refuse meat, he has an excellent judgment in the 

 sunny side of peaches, and he can make a meal at a pinch off the 

 honey in more than one kind of wasp-specialized flower. But the pe- 

 culiar likes and dislikes of wasps have produced a curious effect upon 

 the shape and hue of the blossoms which owe their traits to these 

 greedy and not very aesthetic insects. Your bee has a long proboscis 

 and a keen sense of color ; so the flowers that lay themselves out on 

 his behalf store their honey at the end of a long tube, and rejoice in 

 brilliant blue or crimson or purple petals. Your wasp, on the other 

 hand, in his matter-of-fact Philistine fashion, cares for none of these 

 things : he asks only plenty of honey, and no foolish obstructions in 

 the way of getting it. Accordingly, wasp-flowers are remarkable for 

 having a helmet-shaped tube, exactly fitted to a wasp's head, with 

 abundant honey filling the bottom of the bell, while in color they are 

 generally a peculiar livid reddish brown, more or less suggestive of a 

 butcher's shop. 



We have two or three good typical wasp-flowers, wild or culti- 

 vated, in England, of which the snowberry of our shrubberies is 

 probably the best known to the outside public, other than wasps. But 

 the dingy tig-worts that grow by the water-side are far more note- 

 worthy, because they have such extremely odd-looking, one-sided 

 blossoms, made to measure by nature for the wasp's head. The mi- 

 nuteness with which plants adapt themselves to the merest tricks of 

 habit in the insects to whom they are habitually at home is very well 

 illustrated in this queer plant. Bees and butterflies, and all other 

 regular flower-haunters, have a trick of beginning at the bottom of a 

 spike of flowers (as in foxglove or sage), and working gradually up- 

 ward ; so in these cases the pollen-bags ripen first, while the sensitive 

 surface of the seed-vessel doesn't mature till a later period. Thus, the 

 bee, lighting first on the older and lower flowers, in their second stage, 

 fertilizes them with the "pollen he has brought from the last plant ; 

 while on the upper part of the spike he gathers more pollen, which he 

 carries away to the next plant, and so insures the great desideratum of 

 nature, a healthy cross. But the wasp, with his usual perversity of 

 disposition, reverses all this : he begins at the top of the spike, and 

 works gradually downward. To meet this abnormal fancy of the ves- 

 pine intellect, the fig-wort makes its sensitive surface mature first, 

 while its pollen-bags only shed their mealy dust a little later. So the 

 wasp, lighting first on the newly opened blossoms at the top, comes in 



