Magenta to Pink 



Preferred Habitat Fields, thickets, beside roads, lanes, and walls. 

 Flowering Season June July. 



Distribution Northern part of British Possessions south to Georgia, 

 westward to Nebraska. 



Everywhere at the North we come across this interesting, 

 rather shrubby plant, with its pretty but inconspicuous little 

 rose-veined bells suggesting pink lilies-of-the-valley. Now that 

 we have learned to read the faces of flowers, as it were, we in- 

 stantly suspect by the color, fragrance, pathfinders, and structure 

 that these are artful wilers, intent on gaining ends of their own 

 through their insect admirers. What are they up to ? 



Let us watch. Bees, flies, moths, and butterflies, especially 

 the latter, hover near. Alighting, the butterfly visitor unrolls his 

 long tongue and inserts it where the five pink veins tell him to, 

 for five nectar-bearing glands stand in a ring around the base of 

 the pistil. Now, as he withdraws his slender tongue through one 

 of the V-shaped cavities that make a circle of traps, he may count 

 himself lucky to escape with no heavier toll imposed than pollen 

 cemented to it. This granular dust he is required to rub off 

 against the stigma of the next flower entered. Some bees, too, 

 have been taken with the dogbane's pollen cemented to their 

 tongues. But suppose a fly call upon this innocent-looking blos- 

 som ? His short tongue, as well as the butterfly's, is guided into 

 one of the V-shaped cavities after he has sipped ; but, getting 

 wedged between the trap's horny teeth, the poor little victim is 

 held a prisoner there until he slowly dies of starvation in sight of 

 plenty. This is the penalty he must pay for trespassing on the 

 butterfly's preserves ! The dogbane, which is perfectly adapted 

 to the butterfly, and dependent upon it for help in producing fer- 

 tile seed, ruthlessly destroys all poachers that are not big or strong 

 enough to jerk away from its vise-like grasp. One often sees 

 small flies and even moths dead and dangling by the tongue from 

 the wicked little charmers. If the flower assimilated their dead 

 bodies as the pitcher plant, for example, does those of its victims, 

 the fly's fate would seem less cruel. To be killed by slow torture 

 and dangled like a scarecrow simply for pilfering a drop of nectar 

 is surely an execution of justice mediaeval in its severity. 



In July the most splendid of our native beetles, the green 

 dandy (Eumolpus auratus) fastens itself to the dogbane's foliage 

 in numbers until often the leaves appear to be studded with these 

 brilliant little jewels. "It is not easy," says William Hamilton 

 Gibson, "to describe its burnished hue, which is either shimmer- 

 ing green, or peacock blue, or purplish-green, or refulgent ruby, 

 according to the position in which it rests." But it is not golden, 

 as its specific name would imply. It confines itself exclusively to 

 the dogbane. To prevent capture, it has a trick of drawing up 

 its legs and rolling off into the grass its body so cleverly matches. 



134 



