174 BRITISH PLANTS 



intelligence, and skill. Humble-bee flowers : larkspijr, 

 deadly nightshade, foxglove, white clover ; hive - bee : 

 Viola canina ; short-tongued bees : mignonette. 



2. Butterflies and Moths (Lepidoptera). — ^Most of these 

 insects are long-tongued, and soine of them have tongues 

 longer than any bee. One of the hawk-moths has a 

 tongue which, when fully extehded, is over a foot in 

 length. These insects do not enter the flower, but hover 

 over it, and often without touching the flower at aU, 

 shoot out their tongues into it for the honey. They are 

 not strong insects, and are unable to move aside the 

 heavy structures which bees can, nor can they bite holes 

 through the tissues. Butterflies generally fly by day, 

 and the flowers they visit are generally red or blue. Many 

 moths fly at night, and the flowers they visit are white 

 or bright yellow, the only colours visible at a distance in 

 the dim light of the evening. . Flowers pollinated by 

 night-flying moths are also strongly scented, and many 

 of them only open in the evening when the moths are 

 about — e.g., tobacco - plant, evening - primrose, Silene 

 nutans. The evening-lychnis {Lychnis vespertina) is white, 

 and opens between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. ; the day-lychnis 

 {L. diurna) is a bee-flower, red in colour, open aU day, 

 and closed at night. It has a shorter tube than the night- 

 blooming moth-flower. The apple is white, strongly 

 scented at night, and pollinated chiefly by moths. 



3. Wasps. — One or two flowers in the British flora are 

 visited exclusively by wasps. One is the figwort {Scro' 

 phularia), with small, dull-purple, open flowers, having a 

 rather disagreeable smeU. On a warm sunny day an 

 enormous number of wasps may be seen hovering about 

 these flowers. Wasps are not very efiicient agents of 

 pollination, because, unlike bees, they do not, as a rule, 

 confine their visits to the same species of flower for any 

 length of time. 



4. Small Insects (e.g., flies, beetles, bugs, etc.). — The 

 flowers visited by these insects are usually small and 

 open, and the honey, even if slightly concealed, is easily 

 attainable. They are stupid creatures, and enter at 

 random any flower they meet. A few flowers, however, 

 are specially adapted for fly-pollination. They have a 

 disagreeable odour, resembling that of carrion, but very 

 pleasant to flies. The flowers are so constructed that 



