112 FIFTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES 



days before it seems to have any company. In my location I do 

 not count upon anything usually besides white clover for sur- 

 plus, so no wonder I am interested in it. 



\ARIOUS HONEY-PLANTS. 



Yet there are a good many other plants whose help, all 

 taken together, is not to be despised. If I kept only a few 

 colonies, it is quite possible that I might secure some surplus 

 from more than one of them. 



Dandelions help no little in brood-rearing. 



Raspberries are eagerly visited by the bees, but there are 

 not enough of them to give a noticeable amount of raspberry 

 honey. It is a very pleasant sight to see the bees thickly cover- 

 ing a field of raspberries in full bloom (Fig. 45). 



Red clover may yet be of importance. Whether it be the 

 change in the bees or the change in the season I do not know, 

 but formerly- I never saw a bee on red clover except at rare 

 intervals, and now it is quite common. I think it may be that 

 the bees are different. 



Alsike clover is becoming common. 



SWEET CLO\'ER. 



ll is hard to tell just how much, but 1 think the bees gather 

 quite a little from sweet clovei- (Fig. 4()). The earlier part of 

 the sweel-clover bloom is probably of no great value, because it 

 comes at the same time as white clover, but it continues after 

 white clover is gone, thus making it of greater value. It has a 

 habit of throwing out fresh shoots of blossoms on the lower pait 

 of the stalk after the whole stalk has gone to seed and appears 

 dead, and thus it continues the blooming season till freezing 

 weather comes on. A branch of this kind will be seen at (he 

 t ight in Fig. 46. I value sweet clover for hay. 



Yellow sweet clover blooms from two to four weeks earlier 

 than white sweet clover, and on that account is of less value in 

 a year when common white clover yields well. But in the years 

 wlien common white clover is a failure yellow sweet clover mav 

 be of very great value, for so far as I know there are no years 

 of failure with either kind of sweet clover. There may be no 



