12 i 



FIFTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES 



seemed too difficult to raise to make me care to experi- 

 ment with it on a larger scale. Possibly if I knew better 

 how to manage it, the difficulty might disappear. Or, on 

 other soil it might be less difficult to manage. The same 

 might be said of the other things I have tried. My soil 

 ,is clay loam, and hilly, although I live in a prairie State. 

 I am at least a mile distant from prairie soil. I had an 

 acre of as fine figwort as one would care to see. It died 

 root and branch the second winter ; even the young plants 

 that had come from seed the previous summer. It was 



Fig- 39— Hive-Stand. 



on the lowest ground I had, very rich, and much like 

 prairie. 



\Mien the boom for Chapman's honey-plant (echin- 

 ops spherocephalus) was on, I was among the first to get 

 it, and I succeeded in having a large patch. Bees were 

 on it in large numbers, but close observation showed that 

 a great proportion of them were loafing as if something 

 about the plant had made them drunk. I concluded I did 

 not get nectar enough from it to pay for the use of the 

 land, to say nothing of cultivation. 



