2^6 AUSTRALIAN EEE ; LORE AND BEE CULTURE. 



latter, with their small creamy-white flowers, are equally as attrac- 

 tive in colour as the peach-trees, yet where one bee visits the latter 

 a thousand will visit the former. 



The manufacturing of artificial flowers has become so perfect 

 of late, and the imitations are so much like natural flowers that 

 when placed amongst natural foliage, the experienced eye of the 

 florist frequently fails to detect the fraud.- Even if it be a honey 

 or pollen bearing imitation bees are not deceived thereby. If the 

 colour of the flowers or their forms are the advertisements telling 

 them where they could get honey, how is it that bees and other 

 insects are not swarming on the head-dresses of the fashionably 

 attired ladies of to-day ? No one can deny that these artificial 

 flowers are as perfect both in form and colour to the sight as the 

 natural ones they are meant to represent, only their essentials of 

 reproduction are absent. The food bees require is wanting, and 

 food, and food alone, is the only advertisement that will induce 

 the bee to search for sustenance even in natural blooms. Their 

 natural intelligence and generations of education have taught them 

 the true sources of wealth. Bees will no more search colours in 

 the expectation of getting food than a gold-miner would go fos- 

 sicking in a coal-pit for gold. 



Botanists and entomologists speak of bees as one of the highest 

 types of insects, and Grant Allen, in "The Story of the Plant," 

 speaks of them thus: — "These higher insects . . are the 



safest fertilisers because they have legs and a proboscis exactly 

 adapted to the work they are meant for; and they have also, as 

 .a. rule, a taste of red, blue, and purple flowers, rather than for 

 simple white or yellow ones. Hence, the blossoms that especially 

 lay themselves out for the higher insects are almost always blue 

 or purple." 



Darwin, in "Self -fertilisation of Plants," says: — "Not only 

 do the bright colours of flowers serve to attract insects, but dark- 

 coloured streaks and marks are often present, which Sprengel long 

 ago maintained serve as guides to the nectary," and "that the 

 'coloured corolla is the chief guide cannot be doubted." The 



native daphne (Pittosporum undulatum) flower has a creamy corolla 

 hidden amongst its deep green foliage. These trees, both in the • 

 Botanic and in private gardens, were in bloom at the same time 

 as the double-flowered peach. In the former the bees were in 

 swarms busily at work, and only an odd bee occasionally visited 

 "the latter, and the flowers visited were those containing a few 

 scattered, anthers from whence they could scrape together a few 



