120 rORTY YEARS AMONG THE liEES. 



bees thickly covering 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 little cultivated here. 



SWEET CLOVER. 



It is hard to tell just how much, but I think the bees 

 gather quite a little from sweet clover (Fig. 46). The 

 earlier part of the sweet 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 part of the 

 stalk after the whole stalk has gone to seed and appears 

 dead, and thus it continues the blooming season till freez- 

 ing weather comes on. A branch of this kind will be 

 seen at the right in Fig. 46. I value sweet clover for hay. 



Alfalfa (Fig. 47) is little known here. It is a rare 

 thing to see a bee at work upon it, and I think it is gener- 

 ally understood that it does not yield nectar east of the 

 Mississippi. But the experiment station says that if the 

 land in Illinois be inoculated with some of the soil from 

 the proper alfalfa regions of the West, it will grow as well 

 here. If they can make changes in its growth, is it not 

 just possible that it may yet become a honey-plant here ? 



GIANT WHITE CLOVER. 



A new honey-plant has been mentioned a good deal 

 in foreign bee-journals, a giant white clover, called 

 Colossal Ladino (Fig. 48). I succeeded in getting some 

 seed from Switzerland, sowed a few of them in the win- 



