90 



loving bees only love an azure color when it is for their 

 interest. I have even noticed bees to leave flowers for a 

 time and be content with only leaves ! 



There was a humming sound of bees in a purple-leaved 

 beech tree, and searching for the cause there was found to 

 be on the under side of many leaves a white, woolly sub- 

 stance which concealed numerous green aphides, and that 

 they were living on pellucid little drops of a gumm}^ nature 

 which also attracted the bees ! Similar sweet secretions are 

 found on the common Fagus ferruginea, elm, and in less 

 degree on red ma})le. It is a wonderful faculty that bees 

 have which will enable them to find such minute secretions 

 on leaves, or on inconspicuous green flowers without per- 

 ceptible odor. It is scarcely conceivable when one is 

 acquainted with the hal)its of l)ees that will so diligently 

 and indefatigably search for nectar, that they would hesi- 

 tate on any particular color, because, forsooth, it was not 

 the right tint I 



Bumble bees are a sturdy race of insects, made to crowd, 

 push, probe, and burrow ; therefore they prefer a tubular 

 or bell-shaped flower that they can enter, or a personate or 

 papilionaceous flower that they can force, or a tubular 

 flower not too long that they can probe. Naturally they 

 do not care for small flat flowers or diminutive florets of 

 composites, such as ox-eye daisy, erigeron, achillea, etc. 



The minor insects, as might be expected, fly indiscrim- 

 inately from color to color without preference, arid the 

 same is the case with l)utterflies. I have counted more 

 than twenty difterent kinds of flowers which were visited 

 by the same species of butterfly ! And about the same 

 number by wasps. There is probably not a single kind of 

 flower but that is visited by half a dozen kinds of insects 

 and probably the greater part are visited by many times 

 that number. 



In the case of the tulip we showed how the same bee 

 produced three different colors at the same time by stimu- 



