944 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
Darwin himself says he is not quite sure that in every case the 
colour and markings of flowers are for the sole purpose of attract- 
ing insects. 
T have seen questions something like the following put in agricul- 
tural examination papers: ‘What is the use of colour and 
perfume in blooms?’ Such questions should never be put, when 
we consider that a large majority of the blooms in agricultural 
crops are anemophilous, and many an observant student can 
dispute the fact that colour is the attraction. 
What is the experience of bee-keepers this side of the equator 
as it regards the colour of flowers that are chiefly visited by bees ! 
There is no denying that some of our endemic or native flowers are 
as brightly coloured as the exotics or introduced ones. Before 
the introduction of our fruit-trees and highly-coloured garden 
flowers, the chief honey-gathering social insect was the little 
native bee (Trigona carbonaria), and, therefore, it was the chief 
fertiliser in Australia. 
Darwin tells us that it took ages on the other side of the world 
for the flowers to develop into what they now are in both colour 
and form, and the bees centuries of training to adapt themselves 
to the flowers as they developed. 
Space will not let me give Darwin’s quotations, but all en- 
tomologists and botanists are acquainted with the facts. 
The chief honey-yielding plants of this continent are the 
eucalyptus, pittosporum, and tea-tree families, and all these bear 
whitish flowers. Our introduced fruit-trees and ornamental 
flowering plants bear brightly-coloured blooms. In spring time 
our introduced fruit-trees are conspicuous by the multiplicity of 
their flowers, and our little native bee as readily finds the nectar 
in them as our introduced bee, and they cannot have had the ages 
of experience to guide them. 
And does it not seem very strange that our hive bee, upon its 
introduction here and before it had been sutticiently colonised, 
should have forsaken the bright-coloured flowers -of the Old Land 
that were introduced here at the same time they were? Our 
exotics and our hive bee, as far as Australia is concerned, are 
coeval. Untold generations of bees had been trained to work blos- 
soms in the land of our fathers, and their experience had most, if 
not all, we are told, to do with the development of species and the 
production of the showy flowers we now see around us. But when 
the hive bee crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific and came here 
and found they were among their old friends of the gardens, they 
forsook them and bestowed their attention upcn the simple whitish 
honey-bearing flowers of the Colony—a colour that the writers on 
the subject say they studiously avoid for the more gorgeously- 
coloured ones their progenitors had been at such pains to produce 
