154 AUSTRALASIAN BEE MANUAL 



the substance of the soil taken away every year, and 

 that his land must therefore become impoverished. It 

 is true that if he possessed such an amount of knowledge 

 as might be expected to belong to an intelligent agri- 

 culturist, working upon rational principles, he should 

 be able, upon reflection, to see that such ideas were 

 entirely groundless. Nevertheless, the complaint is 

 sometimes made, in a more or less vague manner, by 

 persons w^ho ought to know better ; and even bee-keepers 

 appear to have occasionally adopted an apologetic tone, 

 arguing that " bees do more good than harm," instead 

 of having taken the much higher and only true stand 

 by asserting that bees, while conferring great benefits 

 on agriculture, do no harm whatever, and that the 

 presence of an apiary on or close to his land can be 

 nothing but an advantage to the agriculturist. 



BENEFICIAL INFLUENCE OF BEES ON AGRICULTURE. 



Ihe \alue of the intervention of bees in the cross- 

 fertilisation of plants is dw-elt upon in Chapter III., 

 " Australasian Bee Manual," third edition, and the 

 reader is referred for further information to the w^orks 

 of Sir J. Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and of Darwin. 

 The latter, in his work on " Cross and Self Fertilisation 

 of Plants," gives the strongest evidence as to the 

 beneficial influence of bees upon clover-crops. At page 

 169, when speaking of the natural order of leguminous 

 plants, to which the clovers belong, he savs, " The 

 cross-seedlings have an enormous advantage over the 

 self-fertilised ones when grown together in dose com- 

 petition " : and in Chapter X., page 361, he gives the 

 following details of some experiments, which show 

 the importance of the part played by bees in the process 

 of cross-fertilisation : — 



Trifolium repens (White Clover).— Several plants were 

 protected from insects, and the seeds from ten flower-heads 

 on these plants and from ten heads on other plants growing 

 outside the net (which I saw visited by bees) were counted, 

 and the seeds from the latter plants were verv^ nearly ten 

 times as numerous as those from the protected plants. The 

 experiment was repeated in the following year, and twenty 

 protected heads now vielded only a single abortive seed, 

 whilst twenty heads on the plants outside the net (which I 



