FRUIT BLOSSOMS 
397 
One-lialf of the great glass building at Ashtabula, Ohio, Cucumbers are replacing the lettuce and 
there are thousands of the golden yellow blossoms yielding to the bees their pollen and nectar. Many of the 
blossoms are visited by two or three bees in five minutes. The results show that the cucumbers are not only 
more perfect in shape but that the crop is much larger. 
such anomalies as the loganberry and the 
blackberry dewberry. In the vast and 
splendid future of fruit culture the im¬ 
portance of the honeybee will now be 
shown by an examination of the pollina¬ 
tion of the more important fruits. 
POLLINATION OP CUCURBITACEOUS FRUITS. 
The flowers of the squash, cucumber, 
melon, and pumpkin are monoecious; that 
is, the stamens and pistils are in different 
flowers on the same plant. Self-fertiliza¬ 
tion is thus impossible, and in the absence 
of insects the vines cannot (unless they are 
artificially pollinated) produce fruit. The 
staminate flowers open a few days before 
the pistillate, are larger, and-are often on 
longer stalks. The nectar is secreted within 
a fleshy cup formed by the fusion of the 
base of the calyx with that of the corolla. 
In the squash (Cucurbita maxima) and 
pumpkin ( C. Pepo ) this cup is large, and, 
except for three narrow slits, is covered in 
the staminate flowers by the column of sta¬ 
mens. The flowers are pollinated chiefly 
by honeybees and bumblebees, which visit 
them in great numbers and can reach the 
nectar with their long tongues. On a clear 
warm day in August the writer has seen a 
staminate flower of the squash visited in 
ten minutes by eight honeybees and four 
wmrker bumblebees (Bornbus terricola). 
Another flower in ten minutes received six 
visits from honeybees and six from bumble¬ 
bees. One of the long-tongued wild bees 
(Xenoglossa pruinosa ) is said to visit only 
the flowers of the pumpkin. In the vicinity 
of pickle factories there are usually from 
five to six hundred acres of cucumbers un¬ 
der cultivation, yielding 75,000 or more 
bushels of fruit. The immense number of 
blossoms require many colonies of honey¬ 
bees for their proper pollination. 
Honeybees are also largely used for pol¬ 
linating cucumbers grown in greenhouses 
for early market. In Massachusetts some 
2000 colonies are required annually to pol¬ 
linate the cucumbers raised under glass, 
one large grower using 80 hives. For the 
c-rop of cucumbers, squashes, melons, 
pumpkins, watermelons, and kindred fi-uits 
we are thus wholly indebted to bees. 
