THE FLOWBB 123 



12. How the bees paint flowers. Have you ever 

 noticed that some insects in seeking honey, fly or creep 

 from one flower to another ; but that bees do not mix 

 different kinds of honey in this way? That is one 

 reason why the higher flowers give no welcome to the 

 lower kind of insects. It does no good to the dandelion 

 if a fly comes to it laden with the pollen of the thistle. 

 Watch the bees at work in a field where the yellow 

 flatweed is in flower, and you will see that they keep 

 to this flower. Where there are beds of the same kind 

 of flower, as phlox or portulaca, it would be interesting 

 to know if the bee visits one colour more than another. 

 Does the bee visit a white portulaca as readily as a 

 pink one ?* One thing is certain, the bees mix the 

 colours by taking pollen from one to another. If you 

 have a bed of phlox of six different colours, it is quite 

 likely that next year you will have seven or eight 

 varieties from the seed taken from the six kinds. Try 

 it. A boy who prides himself on his beautiful phlox 

 beds tells me that he counted 40 different kinds last 

 summer. Now, all these varieties have sprung from 

 one or two kinds that were got wild in Texas ; and we 

 owe the variety to the visiting insects. 



13. We have still much to learn about the colours 

 of flowers and about the way in which flowers and 

 insects work together ; but of one thing we are sure : 

 the flowers that have been most visited by insects 

 have become more and more beautiful, and more and 



*Iil preferring one kind of flower to another, the bee is but little influenced 

 by colour. It is influenced mainly by the amount and accessibility of the 

 honey or pollen. This is why a bee will often neglect the finest garden 

 flowers for gum tree flowers or small greenish flowers that do not catch the^ 

 eye at all. 



