Guests, Welcome and Unwelcome 211 



again; but if they do venture to proceed they are surely 

 lost. 



Stickiness is no impediment to slugs and snails, how- 

 ever, for they overcome it by covering it with their own 

 slime. What they do mind are bristles and prickles, 

 which the armor-clad ant can afford to despise. 



Pricklets, hairs, and fringes inside the blossom, serve 

 often a double purpose, for they both keep out unwelcome 

 visitors and make the welcome ones reach the nectar by 

 the right way. Thus insects wanting to get at the honey 

 in the spur of the garden-nasturtium are obliged to climb 

 over the fringe on one of its three lower petals, and this 

 they cannot do without coming in contact with anthers or 

 pistils, which they might otherwise pass untouched. 



Plants sometimes need protection against even their 

 best friends, the bees, for some of these, in spite of their 

 many good qualities, have a way of trying to reach the 

 nectar by other than the right way — by house-breaking, 

 in fact, instead of by the front door; and others, though 

 willing enough to come in properly, are too small to be 

 serviceable to large blossoms. We have already men- 

 tioned how humble-bees bite through the tube of the jessa- 

 mine, because they find nothing to stand upon while they 

 suck the blossom. But as the jessamine is a foreign 

 flower, this may be thought excusable enough, as there 

 are few insects here able to reach the nectar in the right 

 way. 



Some bees, however, really seem to be lazily inclined, 

 for to save time and trouble, they always bite a hole in 

 the columbine and certain other blossoms. 



The bladder-campion, however, successfully frustrates 

 any such designs by growing a calyx which is so inflated 



