880 
The RURAL NEW-YORKER 
Horticultural Notes 
Bees Injuring Sound Fruit 
I would like to see discussed the 
true facts about bees attacking perfect 
fruit. I would draw you attention to 
“Attacks on Perfect Fruit” in the Coun¬ 
try Gentleman. 1 am a keeper of bees 
and do not liki my (sometimes) gentle 
friends' character besmirched. Isn’t it a 
fact that the bee is only a sucking insect, 
and therefore cannot puncture fruit un¬ 
less another biting insect first opens the 
skin or else opened through some other 
means? I believe all beekeepers would 
like to see this settled.' J 1 . R. landes. 
Pennsylvania. 
Can bees attack and injure ripe fruit? 
Strictly speaking, the statement is- and 
is not true; but the damage they do oc¬ 
curs so rarely as to be hardly worth con¬ 
sideration if account be taken of the fact 
that the bees offset this damage by their 
work of pollination many times over. 
Pees will not attack or bite through the 
skin of sound fruit. From a physiologi¬ 
cal standpoint, they are unable to do 
this, and they never do; but bees will 
suck the juices out. of over-ripe grapes 
and other fruits, which, after a brief 
period of hot weather and frequent rains, 
develop so rapidly that their skins crack. 
►Such fruit is already damaged, and would 
not keep very long. In the case of over¬ 
ripe grapes, where the skins have cracked, 
bees will do damage. Such over-ripe 
fruit has a market value if sold at once. 
Before it. is picked the bees will visit 
the bunches and leave nothing but shriv¬ 
eled skins. In this particular case bees 
ruin the .sale of fruit already damaged, 
but having a market value if sold imme¬ 
diately. 
Bees are often wrongly blamed on 
account of the work done by other in¬ 
sects equipped with cutting jaws, and 
by certain varieties of birds. When the 
skin of any fruit is broken from any 
cause, the bees will suck out the juices, 
provided no honey is coming from the 
blossoms. 
Yellow--jackets are v-ell equipped with 
cutting jaws. They are very fond of 
fruit. They will cut through the skins, 
suck what juice they want and, later on, 
the bees will visit the same punctures. 
The bees are, of course, more numerous, 
look like yellow-jackets, and are by the 
uninitiated given credit for all of the mis¬ 
chief—puncturing as well as sucking the 
skin dry. Yellov’-jackets are particularly 
that the juice could flow-. They also get 
some fruit juice where the birds have in¬ 
jured apples, pears or peaches, and where 
the fruits have cracked open as they rip¬ 
ened. I have seen them around the 
pomace piles at a cider mill, and there is 
no doubt that they will get. apple or pear 
juice whenever they have a chance. 
Honey-bees in search of fruit juice do 
not. seem to be strict prohibitionists, and 
we find them in large numbers around 
any places where they can find a pile of 
rotten apples. If they could bite through 
the skin of an apple or pear, it seems sure 
that they would, but I have never seen 
anything to make me believe that they 
could even work back through the flesh 
of these fruits after the skin had been 
broken, except, when the fruit was pretty 
well rotted. 
In peach time we often find a rather 
large brown beetle burrowing an the ripe 
fruit. Where this beetle or something 
else has opened the skin, honey-bees aTe 
able to follow and take out most of the 
pulp. The flesh of the peach is so largely 
water that they make the appearance of 
taking out the pulp simply by carrying 
away the juice. 
In the red raspberry, when the fruit 
gets overripe, the skin sometimes gets so 
soft that the juice comes through and 
stands out in drops. At that time honey¬ 
bees may be able to break the skin, but 
the berry has passed beyond its useful¬ 
ness as food, and is just ready to let the 
seeds fall and plant themselves. 
From what I can learn of the experi¬ 
ments of others, and from my own obser¬ 
vations, I do not believe that a honey¬ 
Secretary Wallace to Visit Jersey 
Farmers 
New Jersey farmers will have an op¬ 
portunity to make the acquaintance of 
Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wal¬ 
lace and to learn first hand the views of 
the new Federal administration on big 
agricultural problems, at the annual field 
meeting of the State Board of Agricul¬ 
ture, which will be held at the home of 
its president, United States Senator Jo¬ 
seph S. Frelinghuysen, at Raritan, on 
Saturday, July 16. Secretary Wallace, 
with United States Senators Capper of 
Kansas and Ladd of North Dakota, lead¬ 
ers in agricultural advancement in their 
respective States, will be guests of the 
New Jersey Senator for the day, and w-ill 
make addresses. An invitation is ex¬ 
tended to every farmer in New Jersey to 
plan to attend the field meeting in the 
preliminary announcement made by Sec¬ 
retary Alva Agee of the State Board of 
Agriculture. It will, he predicts, be the 
greatest farmers’ picnic ever held in the 
State, the prominence of the speakers as¬ 
suring the. attendance of hundreds of 
leading ngrieuturists from every county. 
EVENTS OF THE WEEK 
DOMESTIC—June 15 a fire engine 
crashed into an express train at a New 
Jersey Central crossing at Perth Amboy, 
N. ,T. Nine firemen were killed and 
three injured. 
Women are not. eligible to jury service 
in Illinois, according to a ruling handed 
down June 21 by Judge Marcus Kavan- 
augh in the Chicago Superior Court. The 
decision was the result of a legal battle 
fought between the jury commissioners 
The Guardians of the Farmhouse 
numerous in the Fall after frost. They 
cut through the skins of fruit unpicked, 
and the bees, because the frost has killed 
natural sources of nectar, will help them¬ 
selves to fruit juices made available by 
the previous act of the yellow-jackets. 
There are certain varieties of birds that 
do a large amount of damage to grapes 
just as they begin to ripen. The most 
notable one is the Cape May warbler, 
Dendroica tigrina. It comes very early 
in the morning. These birds with their 
sharp beaks will make a single hole in 
each berry of a bunch. In later hours 
cf the day. if no honey is coming in from 
natural sources, the bees will find these 
openings and suck the juice out of the 
berries. The birds coming so early in 
the morning are not discovered, but the 
bees coming later in the day are caught 
in the very act, and, of course, are blamed 
for doing all the work. It will readily 
be seen that the real damage is done by 
the birds. This species is more trouble¬ 
some some seasons than others. 
While bees may cause some trouble 
where fruit-drying operations are car¬ 
ried on, as in California, the cases of 
such damage are by no means numerous. 
In 1000 a case was tried at Amity, N. Y., 
where the plaintiff set up the claim that 
the bees punctured his sound peaches. 
The trial lasted for several days, but the 
jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, 
and the bees were exonerated'. 
Ohio. E. R. ROOT. 
I desire to say that I have never known 
of a case where bees have made their w-ay 
through the uninjured skin of apple or 
peach or grape. tiiomas «j. headlee. 
New Jersey. State Entomologist. 
In our orchards bees frequently spend 
much of their tame gathering juice from 
overripe apples which have fallen to the 
ground and been bruised or crushed so 
bee can or does ever break through the 
skin of any fruit, unless the fruit is rot¬ 
ten, or so overripe as to be almost rotten. 
ALFRED C. WEED. 
As to bees in.airing sound, ripe fruit, 
I have not seen them do it. I have seen 
wasps do it. When another entomologist 
of veracity and good eyesight says with¬ 
out qualification that lie has seen honey¬ 
bees do it, I am bound to believe he is 
correct in his statement, even against a 
considerable mass of negative observa¬ 
tions, and especially against negative 
opinion based on mouth structure. It was 
for awhile doubted if the cotton moth 
could puncture ripe, uninjured peaches, 
but I know of nobody who now disputes 
the fact. Since the writer you refer to 
says this puncturing is so rarely done 
that it has no practical significance to 
fruit growers, T accept as correct both 
his observations and his conclusion. 
IT. A. GOSSARD, Entomologist. 
Ohio Experiment Station. 
Honey-bees are often seen working on 
ripening apples, peaches, plums and 
grapes which are growing on the trees 
or vines, and also flying about fruit after 
it is harvested. It is the popular belief 
that because the bees are seen on a 
cracked fruit the bee did the damage. 
Such, however, is not the case. Bees do 
not cause the first injury; it is caused by 
wasps, hornets, birds, or by the natural 
breaking of the skin which occurs during 
wet spells in the Summer and Fall. It 
is- impossible for the bee to puncture the 
skin of the fruit. 
The bee is the fruit grower’s friend, 
and should be considered as such by all 
growers of fruit. It is only when fruit 
is injured that the bees will bother the 
grower, and then it is simply a case of 
the bee trying to save the sugar which 
might otherwise go to waste by decay. 
Tn certain sections of the West, where 
outdoor drying is practiced, bees do 
trouble the drying fruit, but even under 
these circumstances the bee does not punc¬ 
ture the skin ; it has already been rup¬ 
tured in the processes of canning. 
S. P. HOLLISTER, 
Connecticut Agricultural College. 
and Mrs. Etta Bergland Ekberg, who con¬ 
tended women could serve on juries. 
Fifty thousand dollars in bonds and 
certificates were stolen June 21 from Red¬ 
mond & Co., bankers and brokers, 33 Pine 
St., New York, by a supposed messenger 
boy, who is said to have been engaged by 
the firm five minptes before he w r as hand¬ 
ed the package of securities to deliver to 
six other firms in the downtown district. 
The bogus messenger presented himself at 
the brokerage office with an assignment 
slip, ostensibly issued by the Broad Ex¬ 
change Messenger Company 64-66 Broad 
St., which provided boys to brokerage 
houses. It was learned later that the 
exchange had no knowledge of the boy 
and that the assignment slip he presented 
had been stolen. It had not been signed 
by any official of the exchange. A few 
days before $200,000 in securities was 
stolen from the offices of the Sinclair Con¬ 
solidated Oil Company, 45 Nassau St., by 
a burglar who opened three strong boxes 
without leaving any trace. 
Charged with accepting graft from 
homegoing aliens on the promise to fix 
their income tax reports favorably, Dr. 
Percy R. D. Henry, a physician, living at 
315 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, N. Y., 
in charge of the alien income tax office in 
the Custom House for several months, 
was arrested June 21 by internal revenue 
agents. It is charged that in several in¬ 
stances Dr. Henry accepted fees of .$5 
from aliens to show that their income 
taxes had been paid, whereas he had ac¬ 
tually defrauded the government. 
If the theory of government agents and 
the United States Coast Guard Service is 
correct, at least five ships have fallen into 
the hands of pirates or Bolshevik crews 
since last October. The fate of only one 
of these ships is known. She is the 
American five-masted schooner Carroll A. 
Deering, Captain Willis B. Wormwell, 
which went ashore on the south end of 
Diamond Shoals during the night of Jan¬ 
uary 30. The United States has started a 
world-wide search for the crew and to 
dear up this deep mystery of the sea. 
Other ships missing are the American 
steamer Ilewitt, which left Sabine for 
Boston and Portland, Me., on January 21 
and has 'been posted overdue since Febru¬ 
July 2, 1921 
ary 5; the Norwegian barkentine Florino. 
out from Christiania, Norway, since De¬ 
cember 1, bound for Hampton Roads, in 
command of Captain G. T. Knudsen ; the 
Norwegian sailing ship Svartskog, Cap¬ 
tain Neilson, out from Hampton Roads 
since October, bound for Norway, with a 
crew of fourteen, and a Spanish ship of 
the Lorringa Line, missing since March. 
_JThe skeleton of a mastodon, with tusks 
75 in. long, was discovered .Tune 21 by 
Anthony Fichera, a truck gardener, while 
plowing on his farm at Little Britain, N. 
Y. The bones are almost intact and are 
in a good state of preservation, although 
partly fossilized. One of the ribs meas¬ 
ures 50 in. along the curve and 43 in. 
from tip to tip in a straight line. The 
lower leg bone is 35 in. long, and the 
thigh 43 in. long. A striking peculiarity 
is the size of the thigh joint, a huge ball 
of bone 14 in. in diameter. Each jaw 
bone holds three teeth, the enamel still 
being in good condition. Each tooth is 14 
in. long and the combined width of the 
three measures 16 in. This find is the 
third of its kind in the section. 
• Returns from a questionnaire sent out 
by the American Farm Bureau Federa¬ 
tion had been received June 20 from ap¬ 
proximately 40.000 farmers in New York, 
Vermont. Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, 
Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa. South Dakota 
and Minnesota. On the question. “Are 
you opposed to enactment of a general 
sales tax?” the vote was: Yes, 17.947; no, 
22,393. 
Coloring matter left in the sun in the 
plant of the Antonelli Fireworks Com¬ 
pany, Rochester, N. Y., caught fire June 
20 from the sun’s rays and the flames 
communicated to a powder house in the 
center of a group of buildings, causing an 
explosion. Three men and a boy were 
injured, two seriously. 
Two hundred of the two-story frame 
barracks which housed American troops 
at Camp Merritt, near Tenafly. N. .T.. 
were destroyed June 20 by a fire which 
burned for more than two hours and for 
a time threatened to spread to the town 
of Dumont, on the southwest edge of the 
camp. New York fire engines were sent to 
New Jersey to aid in fighting the flames, 
but the fire had been extinguished before 
they arrived. Several buildings were dy¬ 
namited by the firemen to keep the flames 
•away from the town. The fire is believed 
to have been incendiary. 
WASHINGTON.—The House passed 
June 20 Representative Mondell’s bill to 
permit equitable apportionment of the 
water supply of the Colorado River 
among Arizona, California, Colorado, Ne¬ 
vada. New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. 
The measure now goes to the Senate. 
Provision is made that a compact must be 
entered into by representatives of the sev¬ 
en States before January 1. 1923, with a 
representative of the Federal Government 
participating in the. negotiations. Any 
agreement reached would not be binding 
until ratified by the Legislatures of all 
States and by Congress. In favorably re¬ 
porting the bill the Judiciary Committee 
said it had been “assured there was no 
question of navigation or water power in¬ 
volved in the legislation.” 
Approval of seven hospital projects in¬ 
volving an expenditure of $3,010,000, as 
recommended by the board of consultants 
on hospitalization for the treatment of 
former soldiers, was announced June 20 
by Secretary Mellon. The recommenda¬ 
tions provide for the expenditure of $850.- 
000 at the United State Public Health 
Service Hospital No. 55, Fort Bayard. N. 
M.; $500,000 at the United States Public 
Health Service Hospital No. 32, Perry- 
ville. Md.; $250,000 at Fort Logan IT. 
Roots, Little Rock. Ark.; $300,000 at 
Lake City, Fla.; $450,000 at Fort Walla 
Walla, Wash.; $600,000 at Whipple Bar¬ 
racks, Prescott, Ariz., and $60,000 at 
Alexandria, La. 
Immigration officials are making re¬ 
newed efforts to stamp out the smuggling 
of aliens into this country across the Mex¬ 
ican border by persons who, officials be¬ 
lieve. are members of a well organized 
gang, it was said June 21 at the Depart¬ 
ment of Labor. Several members of the 
alleged gang have been arrested and it 
has been established, it w r as added, that 
they have received as high as $300 each 
for enabling aliens to enter this country 
illegally. A big percentage of the aliens 
smuggled across the border are from Rus¬ 
sia, it was said. Before the Russian bor¬ 
der was closed to deportees from the Unit¬ 
ed States they were sent back to that 
country and some have been returned to 
Mexico. 
The deadlock between the Senate and 
House over the naval appropriation bill 
was broken June 21 by conferees with a 
virtual agreement to lop off about $90,- 
000,000 of the $9S,000,000 added to the 
bill by the Senate, and with the right of 
the House to vote directly on the Borah 
disarmament amendment. There are still 
many minor tangles to be cleared away, 
but the conferees were reported in a sub¬ 
stantial agreement on all major points. 
According to the plan as worked out. the 
navy personnel, including naval aviation, 
will stand somewhere between 100,000 and 
108,000, House members holding out for 
the smaller total. 
For the development of submarines as 
a naval arm, a bill to create a new bu¬ 
reau of submarines in the N-avy Depart¬ 
ment was introduced June 21, by Senator 
King, Democrat, of Utah. 
“Well, doctor, boy or girl?” “Trip¬ 
lets, my dear sir.” “Hurrah ! Three in¬ 
come tax exemptions.”—Houston Post. 
