BEES AND HORTICULTURE. 455 



BEES AND HORTICULTURE. 



(Edited by Eugene Secor, Forest City, Iowa, and published by the National Bee- Keepers' 



Association.) 



It is most likely that the higher order of flowering plants and 

 pollen-gathering insects, including honey-bees, were created about 

 the same time, because the best development of the one depends 

 upon the existence of the other. Pollen and honey are necessary 

 for the preservation of certain forms of insect life, and the distribu- 

 tion of pollen by insects seems to be essential to the best develop- 

 ment of the plants visited by them. This has been beheved for a 

 long time by careful observers, but many farmers and fruit growers 

 have regarded bees as of little importance, and some have even 

 classed them as enemies. Honey bees are here referred to, because 

 they are the most important of all the pollen distributing insects. 

 They appear in greater numbers early in the season, and their great 

 activity renders them more potent in this field of usefulness than 

 any other species. 



It is now quite well understood that insects are absolutely 

 necessary to a crop of cucumbers, melons or squashes, and bees 

 are kept for the purpose of pollinating them when grown on a large 

 scale, if there is no apiary in the neighborhood. 



The honey bee as a pollen distributor is perhaps of greater 

 value to this country than the crop of honey produced. It has 

 of late years occurred to scientists that the honey bee is of more 

 benefit for distributing poHen than all other sources combined. 

 That we are largely indebted to the honey bee for both quantity 

 and quality of our fine fruits there is but little doubt, and not only 

 fruits, but vegetables and cereals commonly grown on the farm. 



Bees are not the only insects that are valuable in polleiiizing 

 flowers, but if w-e note very closely we shall find that only on a very 

 small scale compared with the honey bees do other insects accom- 

 plish much of this work. The honey bee is a general pollen 

 gatherer wherever pollen is to be found, and thus works an ex- 

 tensive territory. Bees thoroughly canvass several miles in diameter 

 in search of both pollen and honey, and are always pollen dis- 

 tributors, whether they are engaged in gathering honey or pollen. 

 Who has not seen the cornfields with their heavily laden tassels 

 of pollen swarming with honey bees? Also the clover fields, the 

 buckwheat fields, the orchards, the vegetable fields, the strawberry 

 fields and almost every wild flower that produces either fruit or 

 seed. is daily visited by the busy bee, perhaps every hour in the day, 

 thus distributing pollen from flower to flower, industriously per- 

 forming the work that nature intended them to do. 



