THE INFLUENCE OF BEES ON CROPS. 259 



Jam-makers, during preserving seasons, very frequently, when 

 the bees come to clean up the waste syrup, and perhaps steal a. 

 little from that not found in the waste tub, cause, by means of 

 boiling water, the destruction of millions of these tiny and indus- 

 rious workers. Men do not understand that if they were to cany 

 out this slaughter of the innocents with too high a hand, they would 

 have little or no fruit to preserve. It may be interjected that 

 butterflies, moths, beetles, and other members of the insect world 

 fertilise our frviit crops as well as the bee family. True ; but they 

 leave behind them whole armies — well-drilled armies — of cater- 

 pillars, grubs, Or maggots. These destroy the veiy fruit their 

 parents fertilised, defoliate the trees, cause sickness inducing 

 disease, and ulitmately the destruction of the orchard. This can- 

 not be said of the bee. Butterflies, &c., fly from tree to tree and 

 orchard to orchard, laying a few eggs hero and a few there. It 

 is difficult to confine or introduce them to a district, and when once 

 there it is a greater difficulty still to exterminate them. Insect 

 fertilisers, other than bees, are nearly all solitary and houseless 

 wanderers, and it is a work of patience and labour to mitigate their 

 ravages, and the little good they may do as fertilisers is greatly 

 counterbalanced by the great mischief wrought by their ott'spring. 

 On the other hand, bees are social, arfe domestic, are under control, 

 can be increased or diminished according to requirements. 



The advent of a bee-keeper in a. fruit-growing district is not 

 a blessing in disguise, but a blessing so prominent that a traveller 

 passing through a fruit district by express train during fruit harvest 

 can always see the handiwork of the bee. The orchardist cultivates 

 the trees from which the bees get their pollen and the bee-keeper 

 his honey hai-A^est, and the fruit-grower in his turn is almost entire- 

 ly dependent on the bee- keeper for his harvest of fruit, jsetween 

 bee-keepers, fruit-growers, florists, &c., there is a mutual provident 

 association so strongly united that to repress the former is to ae- 

 stroy the profits of the latter. 



Another interjection : "Have not the bees been the chief agents 

 in the destruction of some of the best varieties of melons, pump- 

 kins, cucumbers, and other members of Cucurbitacece or gourd order 

 that have been introduced into the State?" If by this it is meant 

 that certain varieties of these very useful vegetables have entirely 

 disappeared, and have been replaced by inferior ones, the result of 

 cross-poUenisation, the bee for a while must plead guilty, because the 

 whole of the order Cucurhitacecf is entomophilous, and the bee 

 plays the chief part in the cross-pollenisation. The fertilisation 



