SUPPLEMEN1 



birds often dart at scarlet ribbons or other articles, and by far the 

 greater part of our scarlet flowers admit no other guests, except, of 

 of course, the largest butterflies and moths. I once spent several 

 weeks at the foot of a slope glowing with scarlet Pentstemon, while a 

 few rods away was an equal area covered with the blue Gilia virgata. 

 The Gilia furnished abundant honey, accessible, of course, to hum- 

 ming birds, but- while I could, at almost any time of day, count a 

 half dozen or more humming birds among the Pentstemons, I never 

 once saw them among the Gilias. The Gilias, on the other hand, 

 were thronged with bees. 



Some good botanists advance the theory that red excepting shades 

 allied to violet is distasteful to bees, and that scarlet may be invisi- 

 ble to them, but I have frequently seen hive bees collect pollen from 

 scarlet Pentstemons, and carpenter bees bite through the tubes of 

 columbine and Zauschneria for honey, while the dull re&Scrophularia 

 Californica is always thronged with bees, the Scrophularia, like our 

 peony, being among our exceptional red flowers that have honey 

 accessible to bees. The fact that insects visit consecutively flowers of 

 the same species, can be easily verified. They do not always distin- 

 guish between similar species. I have seen bees visit indiscriminately 

 Gilia densiflora and G. virgata. Occasionally color seems to mislead 

 them ; I have seen a bee at work regularly on the blue Gilia multi- 

 caulis, occasionally alight on the Brodicza capitata, but usually, no 

 matter how many flowers are intermixed, the bee selects only one 

 species until that is exhausted. 



The more common peony of California is called Pceonia Brownii, 

 Dougl. That in the south, which is slightly different from the typical 

 P. Brownii, is sometimes known as P. Californica, Nutt. The peony is 

 excellent for beginning the study of flowering plants ; the flowers are 

 large and simple, and the foliage and underground parts are typical of 

 plants of the cool, rainy season. The flowers obviously bid for cross 

 pollination. In the field I have usually found the stigmas past 

 maturity when dehiscence of pollen begins, so that close pollination 

 was impossible, but the stigmas of flowers kept in the house, remain 

 moist for several days, and an insect working in the flower might 

 effect close pollination. If we were to interpret the color of the 

 flower with reference to pollination alone, we should expect large flies 

 to visit it, and the odor, too, is somewhat suggestive of carrion, but, as 

 a matter of fact, I have never seen it visited by other guests than bees 

 and little thrips. Really the color of the flower does not render it at all 

 conspicuous, but the abundance of honey and pollen more than com- 

 pensates for this in the estimation of the thrifty bee. If we must 



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