80 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



feels sure of obtaining a guaranteed drop of honey as 

 the reward for his services. At the same time, as the 

 stamens have also coalesced with the petal tube, he 

 cannot fail to fertilise the head while helping himself 

 to the honey. This makes red clover a very successful 

 plant, as you can easily see by looking about you in the 

 fields anywhere. It also makes it good fodder ; for as 

 each flower has a pod with only one big bean or seed 

 inside it, the whole head contains a large number of 

 beans, rich in starches and gluten as foodstuffs. It is 

 always the seeds that are the most useful for food ; not 

 the mere hard, stringy leaves and stalks. Everybody 

 knows the difference in effect between a feed of oats and 

 a feed of straw. Pulse, indeed, forms the most valuable 

 set of fodder plants and human foodstuffs in the world, 

 except only the grasses : because the seeds are almost 

 always large and well supplied with albumen. Cows 

 will turn aside from any grass to red clover. Observe, 

 too, that these clover blossoms, like most other highly 

 specialised bee-flowers, are purple. The common small 

 pea-blossoms, such as nonsuch, lotus, kidneyrvetch, and 

 medick are all yellow ; and so are even gorse and broom. 

 Some of the smaller and simpler clovers, too, still retain 

 this aboriginal yellow hue ; but the better kinds, which 

 have advanced further in specialisation for bees, pre- 

 serve for us the various upward stages of white, cream- 

 colour, pink, red, and scarlet, till at last we reach the 

 highest level in these purple heads the highest level, 

 that is to say, yet attained by a clover ; for no species of 

 the genus has so far acquired the most peculiar bee-tint 

 of all, which is dark blue or ultramarine, as seen in the 

 violet or the bugloss. 



