56 
This meeting was held last December; the report gave a number of . 
interesting excerpts from the transactions of the Convention. 
Dr. L. E. Webb, of St. Bethlehem, made a short talk on “The 
Pleasures of Beekeeping,” and delighted the audience with his skilled 
method of handling the subject. He showed that the business can 
be made a very profitable one, and that it is also one from which 
many pleasures can be derived. He dwelt on the life and habits of 
bees, showing the interesting features connected with them. 
RELATION OF BEEKEEPING TO HORTICULTURE 
Paper read before the State Horticultural Society by Dr. J. S. Ward 
Outside of the beekeeping world the great majority of people think 
that the only benefit humanity receives from bees is the production of 
honey and wax. It is not generally known nor even understood that 
bees were created not so much for the purpose of gathering the de- 
licious sweet for mankind, as for carrying the pollen grains from one 
flower to another, so that these may bear fruit and seed. The real 
economical value of the bees is to be found in the work of fertilizing 
Apples 
Fic. 51—Perrect PoLLinaTION Fic. 52—Imperrect PoLLInaTION 
and cross-fertilizing seed and fruit-bearing plants so valuable to man; 
the honey and wax is secondary. 
Comparative anatomy and physiology between animal and plant 
life is one of nature’s most interesting studies. Animals have a skele- 
ton, so does the tree in its cellulose tissue; animals have a skin, so does 
vegetation in its bark; animals have a circulation, lungs, and digestive 
ferments; the tree presents corresponding organs and functions in the 
flow of its sap, in the respiration and transpiration of its leaves and in 
the digestive function of its diastase ferment. Stronger still is the 
analogy when we come to the study of the anatomy and physiology of 
the generative organs. The sex organs exist in plants and flowers very 
much as in animals, and fertilization before fruitage is as absolute in 
one as in the other. In some species the male and female organs are 
found on different plants, as in the mulberry; again, these organs will 
be found in different flowers on the same growth, as in the common 
rag weed, also sometimes called bitter weed, or hog weed. Here the 
stamens and pistils occupy two distinct and entirely unlike flower. 
Common corn is another example of this class of plants that bears 
