BEES IN RELATION TO GARDENING. 



197 



hive the contents of the honey sac are ejected into a cell in which a 

 further process of ripening and concentration takes place. Until the 

 honey is so concentrated that it will not ferment the bees do not cap the 

 cells over, and the bee-keeper who extracts uncapped honey soon finds to 

 his cost that he has- still a lesson to learn from his bees. 



Whether the hive bee visits flowers for honey or pollen it invariably 

 encounters some device by means of which it is deprived of a sufficient 

 quantity of the latter to fertilize the flower. I use the term hive bee 

 advisedly, because the humble bee is less conscientious and often refuses to 

 pay the price that the flower has the right to demand from it. Its powerful 

 jaws enable it to bite through the corolla of a flower and thus to reach 

 the nectary without coming into contact with the pollen. Darwin states 

 that he has seen whole fields of red clover treated in this way, and that 

 in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth he did not succeed in finding a 

 single flower of Erica Tetralix that had not been perforated. Such is the 

 demoralizing effect of the desire to acquire riches quickly that even the 

 highly civilized hive bee will utilize the holes gnawed by the humble bee, 

 and where these abound, it will fly straight to them, without even looking 

 at the proper entrance to the flower. Where humble bees are plentiful, 

 gardeners will frequently notice the blossoms of scarlet runner beans 

 perforated at their base, but I have not myself noticed any diminution in 

 the crop of beans in such cases. 



The devices by means of which flowers force bees to deliver up a 

 portion of their load of pollen are ingenious in the extreme. They have 

 been fully and ably described by Darwin, Muller and Lord Avebury. In 

 the time available to-day only a few representative flowers can be dealt 

 with ; but those illustrated each represent large and important families of 

 plants. 



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(About twenty lantern slides were shown, illustrating the various 

 devices by means of which fertilization is effected by the bee, and cross- 

 fertilization secured.) 



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In order that I might demonstrate the effect of the absence or presence 

 of bees on the crop of fruit I carried out a series of experiments this year 

 and have photographed the results. Gooseberry, red currant and black 

 currant bushes were enveloped in muslin before the blossoms opened and 

 were thus protected from the visits of bees. These bushes were then 

 compared with similar bushes in the same rows and grown under exactly 

 the same conditions with the one exception of the muslin envelope. 

 The illustration (fig. 69, c.) shows a protected gooseberry bush which 

 yielded only six gooseberries. The two adjoining bushes (fig. 69, a and 

 69, b) yielded respectively 151 and 167 berries ; they having been visited 

 freely by bees from hives about fifteen yards distant. Two years ago I 

 happened to photograph the same bush that was protected this year in 

 order to show a friend who complained of the failure of his gooseberry 

 crop that I had been more fortunate than he. The number of berries 

 was nineteen when the photograph was taken (fig. 69, d) ; but a heavy toll 

 had then been taken by the birds. The six berries on the protected bush 

 were probably due to the presence of a raspberry beetle which was 



