502 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
facts are otherwise. Being a beekeeper on a somewhat exten- 
sive scale, | have made it my business for some years back to 
search out the facts relating to bees and flowers for myself, and 
to ascertain with certainty what plants are visited by the hive 
bee (Apis mellifica) at the various seasons of the year. The 
notes on the subject collected by me are very extensive, and I 
hope to publish them on a future occasion. Believing with many 
others that Darwin’s statement that the hive bee did not visit 
the red clover was equally applicable in this country as in Eng- 
land, I made no attempt to verify or disprove it until three years 
ago, when my attention was drawn to the matter by the authors 
of numerous American bee books, asserting that their bees fre- 
quently obtained honey from red clover. After this I constantly 
visited several large fields of the English variety, and one of the 
American, and after numerous disappointments was at last de- 
lighted to find my busy little friends very hard at work on the 
red clover, not in tens or hundreds, but literally in thousands. 
This was in the early autumn months, February and March, 
when a dearth of honey usually prevails about Christchurch. 
An examination under the microscope revealed the fact that the 
quantity of honey was exceedingly small in each flower, but the 
bees doubtless found it better than none at all. During the last 
two seasons I have been able to amply verify these observations. 
There cannot, therefore, be the slightest doubt that the honey 
bee is perfectly able to extract the honey from the red clover 
blossoms in New Zealand, and also in America; but that the 
quantity is so small as not to be worth collecting when more 
generous kinds of plants are in flower. I am confirmed in this 
opinion by a remark of Mr Meehan, an excellent American 
authority on fertilisation, who observed that humble bees would 
not visit a field of red clover when the white clover (7rzfolium 
repens) was in blossom, and yet the red clover fields “ bore seed 
as fully as most insect-frequented fields would do.” Mr Darwin 
lays some stress on the tongue of the hive bee being too short 
to reach the nectaries of certain flowers ; but he appears to have 
been unacquainted with a fact well known to gardeners, that the 
hive bee when unable to enter a. narrow corolla, is in the habit 
of tearing open the tube at the side, and so reaching the nectary. 
I haveobserved that thisis the casemore especially with the species 
of Lycium. A large plant of Lycium afrum, cultivated in the 
Christchurch Public Gardens, every year bears many thousands 
of blossoms, which are crowded with bees during several weeks, 
and they may at any time during the flowering season be seen 
at work tearing open the corolla tubes to get at the abundant 
supply of nectar within ; of course, this is an illegitimate kind 
of proceeding, but the fertility of the plant is not in the least 
injured by it, for it seeds most abundantly. A similar instance 
occurs in the common bean Fada vulgaris. We may, therefore, 
safely assume that the hive bee can, as a rule, obtain the honey 
from the nectary of almost any flower yielding sufficient nectar 
to render the operation a profitable one to the insect. In con- 
