FRIENDS AND ENEMIES 
39 
attract them. Some people plant trumpet vine 
and coral honeysuckle just to entice them. If 
they do come they dash from one flower to an¬ 
other in a perfect frenzy of joy. Their little 
wings beat so fast they seem to be just a blur in 
the air. Their sharp little beaks find the nectar 
in a second and drain every drop. They do 
not care for pollen as the bees do, but, of course, 
it sticks to them anyway, and they carry it to 
other flowers to pollinate them. 
Crawling insects, like ants, usually are 
enemies to plants, while flying insects, like bees 
and wasps, are friends. A plant’s problem is 
to make the flying insects welcome and at the 
same time keep out the crawlers. The crawl¬ 
ers are enemies because they eat the pollen and 
drink the nectar but do not carry the pollen to 
the other flowers. It is easy to see that by the 
time an ant crawled all the way down the stem 
of a rose-bush and up another stem to another 
rose, the little bit of pollen that had clung to 
him would be brushed off. A bee, on the other 
hand, flies in the air from one flower to another 
How do plants 
protect them¬ 
selves? 
