COLOUR OF FLOWERS— ITS INFLUENCE ON BEE LIFE. 301 



I have seen questions something like the following put in agri- 

 cultural examination papers : "What is the use of colour and per- 

 fume in blooms ? Such . questions should never be put, when we 

 consider that a large majority of the blooms in agricultural crops 

 are anemophilous, and many an observant student can dispute the 



fact that colour is the attraction. 



*~ 



What is the experience of bee-keepers this side of the equator 

 as it regards the colour of flowers that are chiefly visited by bees ? 

 There is no denying that some of our endemic or native flowers are 

 as brightly coloured as the exotics or introduced ones. Before the 

 introduction of our fruit-trees and highly-coloured garden flowers, 

 the chief honey-gathering social insect was the little native bee 

 (Trigona carbonaria), and, therefore, it was the chief fertiliser in 

 Australia. 



Darwin tells us that it took ages on the other side of the world 

 for the flowers to develop into what they now are in both colour 

 and form, and the bees centuries of training to adapt themselves to 

 the flowers as they developed. 



Space will not let me give Darwin's quotations, but all ento- 

 mologists and botanists are acquainted with the facts. 



The chief honey-yielding plants of this continent are the 

 eucalyptus, pittosporum, and tea-tree families, and all these bear 

 whitish flowers. Our introduced fruit-trees and ornamental flower- 

 ing plants bear brightly-coloured blooms. In spring time our intro- 

 duced fruit-trees are conspicuous by the multiplicity of their flow- 

 ers, and our little native bee as readily finds the nectar in them as 

 our introduced bee, and they cannot have had the ages of exper- 

 ience to guide them. 



And does it not seem very strange that our hive bee, upon its 

 introduction here, and before it bad been sufficiently colonised, 

 should have forsaken the bright-coloured flowers of the Old Land 

 that were introduced here at the same time they were ? Our exotics 

 and our hive bee, as far as Australia is concerned, are coeval. 

 Untold generations of bees had been trained to work blossoms in the 

 land of our fathers, and their experience had most, if not all, we 

 are told, to do with the development of species and the production 

 of the showy flowers we now see around us. But when the hive bee 

 crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific, and came here and found they 

 were among their old friends of the gardens, they forsook them 

 and bestowed their attention upon the simple whitish honey-bear- 

 ing flowers of the State — a colour that the writers on the subject 



