1878. 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



331 



[Continued from last month.] 

 SUBSTITUTES FOR POLLEN. 



Not a few of our readers have been per- 

 plexed and astonished, doubtless, by seeing 

 the bees in early spring, greedily appro- 

 priating sawdust, just as they do rye meal, I 

 have seen them at the sawmills, so thick on 

 a lai'ge heap of fresh sawdust as to attract a 

 large crowd of people, and when I caught 

 them, and tasted of the pollen from theii- 

 legs, I was somewhat amazed to find it sweet 

 and very much like the pollen from the llow- 

 ers. I presume they had plenty of honey 

 but no pollen, and that these fine particles 

 of wood contained enough of the nitrogen- 

 ous element to answer very well, mixed with 

 honey, as they have it, when packed in their 

 pollen baskets. The pollen from green tim- 

 l>er contains an essential oil, besides some 

 gummy matter, that gives an odor doubtless 

 reminding the bees of the aroma of the open- 

 ing buds. Not only do they thus collect the, 

 to us, tasteless sawdust, but they have been 

 found at different times on a great variety 

 of substances. A friend in Michigan, at one 

 time found them loading up with the fine 

 black earth of the swamps, and they have 

 been known to use even coal dust ; but the 

 strangest thing of all, was told me by the 

 owner of a cheese factory near by. He said 

 the bees were one day observed hovering 

 over the shelves in the cheese room, and as 

 their numbers increased, they were found to 

 be packing on their legs, the fine dust that 

 had accumulated from handling so much 

 cheese. Microscopic investigation showed 

 this dust to be embryo cheese mites, so that 

 the bees had really been using animal food 

 as pollen, and living animals at that. If one 

 might be allowed to theorize in the matter, 

 it would seem this should be a rare sub- 

 stance to crowd brood rearing to its utter- 

 most limit. As clieese can now be bought 

 here for 6 or 8c. by the quantity, it might 

 not be so very expensive for bee food after 

 all. 



Bees can be taught to use a great variety 

 of articles of food in tins way, when they are 

 in need of pollen, and therefore the story of 

 giving a hive of bees a roasted cliicken, to 

 promote their comfort and welfare, may be 

 not entirely a myth. Ground malt, such as 

 is used in making beer, has been very highly 

 recommended in place of rye meal, but as I 

 have never succeeded in getting any of it, I 

 cannot speak from practical experience. 

 The princii)al supi)ly of pollen in our locality 

 is from maple in the spring, and from corn 



in the latter part of summer and fall. Al- 

 most all flowers that yield honey, yield pol- 

 len also, to a greater or less extent, and 

 when the bee comes in laden with the one,"; 

 he almos always has some of the other. The 

 red clover yields a peculiar dark green pol- 

 len, that pretty surely indicates when the 

 bees are gathering honey from it. They of- 

 ten get a considerable load of honey, with 

 but a very small one of pollen ; but, if you 

 did not notice very carefully, you would quite 

 likely declare that they had gathered no hon- 

 ey at all. 



The pollen from corn is generally gather- 

 ed early in the morning; when it is first 

 coming into bloom, I have seen them start 

 out in the forepart of the day, much as they 

 do for a buckwheat field. 



THE AGENCY OF THE BEES IN FERTILIZINGh 

 PLANTS, BY MINGLING THE POLLEN. 



This is too wide a subject to be discussed 

 at full length here, but I will give you a few 

 examples, to start you on the track. A per- 

 fect blossom contains both stamens and pis- 

 tils, the male and female organs of repro- 

 duction ; but sometimes we find fiowers hav- 

 ing stamens only, and others having pistils 

 only ; and these two blossoms may be borne 

 by th3 same plant or by different plants. 



If I am correct, the plant is fertilized by 

 the pollen from the stamens falling on the 

 stigma at the summit of the pistil. Unless 

 this is done, the plant ripens no seed. Na- 

 ture has adopted a multitude of devices for 

 carrying this pollen from one blossom to the 

 other, but perhaps the most general, and the 

 one with which we have to do principally, is 

 the agency of the bees. Common corn is an 

 illustration of a class of plants that bear 

 both kinds of blossoms on the same stalk. 

 The blossom that bears the seed is low down, 

 and is what we commonly term the silk of 

 the ear. The one that bears the i>ollen is at 

 the very summit of the stalk, and the pollen, 

 when ripe, is shJQven off and falls on the silk 

 below ; or what is still better, it is wafted 

 by the wind to the silk of the neighboring 

 stalks, thus preventing in and in breeding, 

 in a manner strikingly analagous to the way 

 in which the drones fly out in the air, that 

 the chances may be greatly in favor of their 

 meeting queens other than those from their 

 own hives. You may object that the silk 

 from the ear of corn is not properly a flower, 

 so 1 will give you a more striking instance. 

 The common rag weed, avtemisoe folia, als'^) 

 sometimes called bitter weed or hog weed, 

 bears two distinct, and entirely unlike, flow- 

 ers. 



