BEES AND HOKTICULTURE. 461 



are absolutely inadequate to pollinate our orchard trees. The non- 

 seeding of red clover for the early first crop is because the bumble- 

 bees are too few to properly cross-pollinate the bloom. It is pos- 

 sible that in this case the flowers are fertile to the pollen of other 

 red clover blossoms but not to their own. 



The orchardist then must have the bees. To drive them away 

 would be to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. 



Again, bees never attack sound fruit. They only come when 

 bird, wasp or sultry weather, combined with over-ripeness, break 

 the rind and cause the juice to exude. Possibly bees could bite 

 open the skin of the fruit, but positively they never do. Yet let the 

 juice once ooze, and the bees quickly hie to tree or drying tray, and 

 leave little behind to show what was once there. 



When we remember that nearly 90 per cent of the ripe fruit 

 is juice, and that the bees take this, we see that little would be left. 

 The juice often oozes from very ripe fruit, and so bees are often in 

 the vineyard to the great annoyance of those who would gather in 

 the vintage. Fruit on the trays in the drying-yard has the skin 

 removed, or is cut open, and so the bees may take most of it unless 

 repelled by sulphuring, which is now generally done. We see, then, 

 that bees are a disturbance at times, and annoy the orchardist great- 

 ly. Then must the apiarist be driven off? Not so, say the 

 European pomologists. They want the bees, and there is no quar- 

 rel between the two industries. Not so, say the most intelligent 

 fruit-men of our own state and country, for we must have the bees 

 to aid us in time of bloom.. 



What then? It may be wise to move the bees temporarily on 

 rare occasions when the annoyance is most severe. If so, who 

 should bear the expense? Surely, not the bee-keeper, for he was 

 the pioneer in the region and has a first, or at least an equal, right. 

 The removal is for the fruitman, and he should be at the most, if not 

 all, of the expense. But each should know all the facts, that bees 

 are never harmful to flowers, but always necessary to best success, 

 and they are only injurious to wounded fruit; that if they are tem- 

 porarily removed it is for the good of the fruitman, and he should 

 bear the expense. The harm is usually not great, and the annoy- 

 ance usually almost nothing, so that if the bee-men and the fruit- 

 men donate the one to the other their choicest products, and culti- 

 vate good-feeling and not enmity, each may be a tremendous 

 blessing to the other, and all the best of neighbors.: — Prof. A. J. 

 Cook, Los Angeles Co., Cal. 



