54 
NATURE NOTES 
another old-world plant and pot-herb, of whose virtues, real or 
fancied, the modern housewife takes little heed. Besides being 
an olitory — to use an archaic term — the plot is an asylum for 
plants interesting either as sources of food and medicine or as 
noxious weeds to be admired, maybe, but nevertheless shunned. 
The purple-veined flaccid henbane grows side by side with the 
alien thorn-apple and the deadly nightshade bearing its “ devil’s 
cherries,” the garden beet is abreast of the artichoke and runner 
bean, and the gipsy-wort of our plashy ditches is in close 
fellowship with its natural congener the brooklime, or false 
forget-me-not. 
It is August, and the temperature is fervent. The birds are 
all silent save only an occasional robin, the universal sparrow 
and the sturdy yellow-hammer. It is too burdensome to move 
about. Be it mine therefore to lie at full length on the sward 
and enjoy the olitory. For the present, the larger, and (must it 
be confessed ?) more educational, herbaceous ground shall be 
passed over, and even the charming tank with its duckweed, 
arrowhead and potamogeton shall be as if it were not. And }'et 
it is not the best time to see the herbs, for many, including some 
of those already named, have bloomed and are now fruiting. 
Stay, that faint murmuring undertone suggests that there are 
bees to be watched. Bees, stigmas, pollen — Darwin, Lubbock, 
Grant Allen — cross-fertilisation, modification, responsiveness, 
refractoriness — the ideas crowd upon and chase each other. 
Well, I will watch. Shortly, as I expect, I notice an exception 
to the rule so dogmatically asserted by man}^ writers, that in a 
given excursion a bee visits only one kind of flower ; at least, 
here is a bee exploring two or three different species. The rule, 
as a rule, seems sound enough, however. Another striking fact 
is that, as far as this limited space is concerned, the hive bees 
and the humble bees appear to keep to separate flowers — their 
spheres of influence rarely overlap. The “ flies,” as we may 
loosely term a number of the smaller Hymenoptera (“ membrane- 
winged ”), although the bees belong to the same Natural Order, 
seem also to feed with their own kind. The flies examine mainly 
those inconspicuous flowers which are clustered in heads like 
the corn-marigold, or the parasol-shaped inflorescences like those 
of fennel. Indeed, it was on the blooms of tansy and fennel 
that the flies were chiefly noticed, but the umbels of the latter 
plant had a cross journey or two from a humble bee. 
The honey bees themselves patronised marjoram, purple 
medick, scarlet-runner and yellow rue, but their prime dainties 
were orpine — a thick fleshy kind of stonecrop — and chicory or 
succory. The choice was thus for the reds, purples and blues ; 
the chicory, of course, having a delicate azure tint. The yellow 
flower, rue, had probably other enticements besides colour, for 
its attractiveness was decidedly slight compared with that of the 
orpine and chicory. Bees are said to prefer blue, but the 
season was too late to make a strict comparison — the seasonal 
range of the blue flowers is earlier. 
