6o AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



ADDRESS: LIFE, HABITS AND DEVFXOPMENT OF 

 THE HONEY BEE. 



By Dr. James P. Porter, Worcester, Mass. 



Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen and fellozv scholars: 



I have here on the screen the representation of a cucumber. 

 Every year in the State of Massachusetts the cucumber grow- 

 ers use one thousand colonies of bees. They use them in order 

 to make sure that their cucumber vines produce cucumbers. As 

 many of you know, the cucumber is pecuHar, the male flower 

 being on one plant and the female flower on another plant. 

 Now in order that the cucumber vine produce cucumbers the 

 grower, before he made use of the bee, would take a little 

 brush and go from one plant to another and carry the dust or 

 the pollen that is grown on one plant and put it on another. 

 Unless that is done the cucumbers which grow in the green- 

 houses will not produce, so the cucumber grower has found that 

 each season he must bring to his greenhouse a colony of bees 

 and allow those bees to fly inside. They go from one blossom 

 to another and fertilize those cucumbers, and thus he is enabled 

 to produce a crop. We see then that there is direct use for the 

 honey bee in the fertilization of the cucumber plant. Now I 

 want to show you something of the life and the habits of the 

 honey bee, and above all to show you the relation of the bee to 

 the work of the apple grower. 



This slide represents the different parts of the blossoms of 

 plants. One part of the plant produces the pollen or the yellow 

 dust which you find on the apple blossom and on the blossoms 

 of many other plants. Another part when a grain of pollen falls 

 on it is fertilized. The grain of pollen passes down through a 

 tube, and therefore this plant will produce seed- Darwin, 

 working nearly a hundred years ago, found that a great many 

 of our plants will not produce seeds unless they are properly 

 fertilized and properly pollenized. That means that the pollen 

 from one plant must be carried to another, or, in other words, 



