ARTIFICIAL FERTILISATION. 



281 



the soil. The practical bee-keeper in any district is a confederate 

 -that should be welcome to all. The indiscriminate desti'uction of 

 native honey-producing flora should be carefully avoided, because 

 most of the plants that I have i-eferred to in these articles ana 

 ■exotics, and these as a rule bloom in the early spring, and the pollen 

 and honev obtained therefrom is used in the spring and summer 

 for the raising of young brood. The stores gathered from indi- 

 genous summer and autumn flowers are to carry them over the 

 severity of the winter. If there be not sufficient storage when the 

 cold and wet season sets in to carry them through till springtime 

 it will cause an insufficiency of bees to do the work Nature has 

 assigned for them, and the result will be a lesser ingathering of 

 the fruits of the tillers" labours. Landowners and others cannot 

 have the remotest idea of the mischief they are doing to the vege- 

 table kingdom, and therefore to mankind, by the wholesale de- 

 struction of our native flora. If these are wholly, or nearly wholly, 

 -cleared from the land to the extent of giving insufficient winter 

 storage for our bees so as to decimate them to the extent of their 

 numerical inability to carry on the necessary work of fertilisation, 

 the result will be more disastrous than droughts or flocxls to our 

 fruit trees, because these would cease to yield their crops. 



The sons of our agriculturists and others engaged on the land 

 are instructed in pruning, grafting, budding, and other con- 

 comitant adjuncts for obtaining a living from the soil, but none 

 of these are more necessary than an acquaintance with l>ee-managc- 

 ment — the practical part of it at least. Apart from the profits 

 from the sale of the honey, or that used in the home (there is no 

 food more healthy and invigorating), the presence of bees on a 

 honrestead are as necessary as the implements of husbandry, nay 

 indeed more so. 



Therc is yet another phase of this subject I intend to deal 

 witli. I have confined myself to the influence of bees on fruits: 

 here I intend dealing with them as florists. 



It has been advocated by the very liighest scientific authorities 

 for the Darwinian theory of the development of species in the 

 vegetable kingdom, that colours and perfume of floweis have bocn 

 jjroduced chiefly, if not entirely, by the visitation of l>ee=i and 

 other insects — that our brightest coloured flowers have been de- 

 veloped from progenitors of inconspicuous tints, and the highly 

 ^attractive shades of the blooms of to-day are the result of the 

 showy character of, as regards colour, a less-favoui-ed earlier race. 

 The same is also said to be the reason of our highly-perfumed 



