MID-SUMMER ALONG THE OLD CANAL. 89 



some umbels of purple flowers are very attractive but 

 prove a veritable death trap to many a bee and 

 unwary insect which visits them in search of honey. 

 For the pollen of each flower, instead of being in 

 numerous small grains, as is usual in other plants, is 

 massed into a few waxy and adhesive bunches ; 

 and is so arranged that when an insect touches a 

 certain point the pollen mass moves suddenly up- 

 ward and clings by a slender stalk to the leg of the 

 visitor. 



If, as sometimes happens, a mass adheres to each of 

 three or four of its legs the unhappy insect is so 

 encumbered that it cannot move and so remains a pris- 

 oner until death. Almost every insect which leaves a 

 bunch of milkweed flowers carries away one or more 

 of the waxen masses, and as it goes immediately to 

 an adjacent bunch, cross fertilization is thus more 

 readily and surely accomplished than by ordinary 

 methods of pollen distribution. 



Queen of all our creeping or trailing shrubs is the 

 trumpet creeper with its large pinnate leaves rivaling 

 the emerald in their shade of green, and its giant 

 trumpet-like flowers so attractive to humming bird 

 and humble-bee. Mid-summer is the time, and the 

 banks of the old canal the place, .to see this creeper in 

 ail its primitive beauty. There the soil is congenial 

 and bush and shrub furnish a ready support to which 

 its aerial rootlets freely cling, thus forming many a 

 snug retreat. in which the nest of woodland songster 

 is securely hidden. 



Numerous other wild flowers, many of which are 

 as deserving of praise as those above mentioned, are 



