FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 89 



BEES AND FRUIT. 



BY PROFESSOR U. P. HEDRICK, AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. 



"How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour," is not only a 

 matter for the poet, the moralist and the beekeeper, but one as well for the 

 fruit grower. Indeed, I am not sure but that it is a matter of more 

 import to the fruit grower than to any one else. Providence has allotted 

 the bee a task in gathering pollen all the day to fertilize each flower, if 

 you allow such a parody on good John Watts, which man cannot perform 

 and which is illy performed by any other means. 



The fruit grower who complains of bees is an ungrateful wretch. At 

 best fair exchange is no robbery, but the bees take nothing. A crop of 

 honey removes no fertility from the soil, no substance nor flavor from the 

 fruit, not even the fragrance from the flower. Multitudes of bees may 

 store their hives with "choicely culled sweets"' from your orchard and 

 you may take it and feast yourself on the apple-blossom-flavored honey, 

 or you may sell it for dollars and cents, jet neither your trees nor your 

 farm is the loser by one penny's worth. If the bees take a little toll from 

 the fruit, what of it? Should they not be repaid for officiating at the 

 nuptials of your fruit blossoms? But do they take toll? 



DO BEES IX JURE FRUIT? 



Do bees injure fruit? Perhaps you have heard the story of the woman 

 who went in quest of her husband who was supposed to be taking a 

 bath. At the door of the bathroom she called him by the endearing term 

 "honey" and thrice repeated "honey ! honey ! honey !" The bather hap- 

 pened not to be the husband, but a man-servant who evidently had never 

 been "honeyed" and did not understand the call. He answered, "This 

 ain't no beehive, it's a bath room." Now I am not a beekeeper, but a peda- 

 gogue, and scarcely know a beehive from a bath room, and positively do 

 not know from observation whether bees injure fruit or not, but I can 

 give quotations from several good authorities on the subject which set- 

 tles the question in my mind. 



Prof. C. V. Riley, late chief of the division of entomology in the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, says, in summing up the results of a 

 series of investigations on this subject : "The experiments show conclu- 

 sively that bees do not injure fruit at first hand and this fact is in keeping 

 with the structure of the mandibles as compared with those of the wasps, 

 which generally do the injury." ^ 



Prof. A. S. Packard, author of several standard text books on ento- 

 mology, speaking of the disease "apiphobia," says : "This disease, apipho- 

 bia as many call it, has afl'ected mankind before. Among some of its 

 attending symptoms are intense bigotry (sometimes leading to much per- 

 secution), and an unreasoning credulity, so that all sorts of horrible sto- 

 ries regarding these entomological monsters are eagerly believed. A little 

 knowledge of natural history is really the only antidote yet discovered 

 against this disease." 

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