FIFTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES 121 



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 becoming common. 



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 ap- 

 pears dead, and thus it continues the blooming season till 

 freezing weather comes on. A branch of this kind will be seen 

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



Yellow sweet clover blooms from two to four weeks earlier 

 than white sweet clover, and on that account is of less value in 

 a year when common white clover yields well. But in the years 

 when common white clover is a failure yellow sweet clover may 

 be of very great value, for so far as I know there are no years 

 of failure with either kind of sweet clover. There may be no 

 small advantage in having the annual variety of yellow sweet 

 clover. 



Alfalfa (Fig. 47) has become quite common here, a boom 

 for it having started about 1912. But it is a rare thing to see a 

 bee at work upon it, and I think it is generally understood that 

 it does not yield nectar east of the Mississippi. 



GIANT WHITE CLOVER. 



A new honey plant was 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 window in the winter, and had the plants 

 bloomjng in the summer of 1902. For the purpose of compari- 

 son you will see in Fig. 48, at the right, a branch of red clover. 



