Wild Flowers as They Grow 



thousand five hundred varieties that are said to 

 be known. 



Now the Prosopis is supposed to be the present- 

 day representative of the primitive wild bee, from 

 which all bees have been evolved. She occupies the 

 same position in the bee world with regard to the 

 hive bee that the cave-dweller occupies in com- 

 parison with a respected London citizen. She is 

 small, half starved and naked, and has no beautifully 

 arranged hive for a home ; all she can provide are 

 a few poor cells in galleries in dead wood or loose 

 earth. Solitary and alone she lives, storing up a 

 Uttle honey for her offspring, but, djdng before her 

 eggs hatch, she never knows them. She has no 

 long proboscis such as the hive bee has, but merely 

 a short, flat, trowel-shaped one with which she 

 plasters her cells, but which (and here plant and 

 insect are mutually adaptive) is the very thing to 

 prise open the Ud of the honey chest in the Mignonette. 

 Only a bee fashioned in this way can get at the 

 flower's treasure, and thus we see that even the 



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