22 



acknowledged ; but still cases do sometimes occurs though rarely, of 

 farmers objecting to the vicinity of an apiary, and complaining of 

 bees as " trespassers," instead of welcoming them as benefactors. 



Are Bees Trespassers ? 

 It is not, perhaps, surprising that at first a man should imagine 

 he was being injured in consequence of bees gathering honey on his 

 land, to be stored up elsewhere, and for the use of other parties ; he 

 might argue that the honey belonged by right to him, and even 

 jump at the conclusion that there was so much of the substance of 

 the soil taken away every year, and that his land must therefore 

 become impoverished. It is true that if he possessed such an 

 amount of knowledge as might be expected to belong to an intelli- 

 gent agriculturist, working upon rational principles, he should be 

 able, upon reflection, to see that such ideas were entirely groundless. 

 Nevertheless the complaint is sometimes made, in a more or less 

 vague manner, by persons who ought to know better ; and even bee- 

 keepers appear occasionally to adopt an apologetic tone, arguing that 

 " bees do more good than harm," instead of taking the much higher 

 and only true stand by asserting that bees, while conferring great 

 benefits on agriculture, do no harm whatever, and that the presence 

 of an apiary on or close to his land can he nothing but an advantage 

 to the agriculturist. 



Beneficial Influence of Bees on Agriculture. 

 We have already in Chapter HI. dwelt upon the value of the 

 intervention of bees in the cross-fertilisation of plants, and can here 

 only refer the reader for further information to the works of Sir J. 

 Lubbock and of Darwin. The latter, in his work on "Cross and 

 Self Fertilisation of Plants," gives the strongest evidence as to the 

 beneficial influence of bees upon clover-crops. At page 169, when 

 speaking of the natural order of leguminous plants, to which the 

 clovers belong, he says, " The cross-seedlings have an enormous 

 advantage over the self-fertilised ones when grown together in close 

 competition " ; and in Chapter X., page 361, he gives the following 

 details of some experiments, which show the importance of the part 

 played by bees in the process of cross-fertilisation : — 



Trifoliuvi re^yem (White Clover).— Several plants were protected from 

 msects, and the Seeds from ten flower-heads on these plants and from ten 

 heads on other plants growing outside the net (which I saw visited by 

 bees) were counted, and the seeds from the latter plants were very nearly 

 ten times as numerous as those from the protected plants. The experi- 

 ment was repeated in the following year, and twenty protected beads now 

 yielded only a single abortive seed, whilst twenty heads on the plants 

 outside the net (which I saw visited by bees)" yielded 2 290 seeds 



