FRUIT BLOSSOMS 
407 
cherry crop has been much larger than for¬ 
merly, while those orchards nearest us, five 
miles from here, where no bees are kept, 
have produced but light crops.” 
The flowers of the sour cherry (P. Cera- 
sus) closely resemble those of the sweet 
cherry, but the petals are flatter and the 
stigma matures before the anthers. Self- 
pollination is thus at first impossible. The 
position of the stamens and the opening of 
the anthers outwardly also tend to prevent 
automatic self-pollination. Not a single 
fruit set when insects were excluded from 
cherries, says the Journal of the Board of 
Agriculture, England. Neither did any fruit 
mature when the flowers were pollinated 
with their own pollen, but all the flowers 
pollinated from another variety set fruit. 
So necessary are the honeybees for cherry 
orchards that the growers have imported in 
one case a carload of bees from the South. 
A very interesting case came under the 
observation of the author of this book. He 
was asked to put bees in a cherry orchard 
about ten miles from his home town. 
There were ten acres of trees, and, 
therefore, there were ten colonies put in the 
orchard. The season was very cold and 
backward at the time the trees came into 
bloom. There was only an hour or two that 
the sun shone and it was warm enough 
for the bees to fly. At the close of the sea¬ 
son, only those trees near the hives of bees 
yielded cherries in abundance, while those 
remote from the bees had very few or no 
cherries at all. It was very noticeable 
that the yield of cherries on the trees 
was almost in direct ratio to the dis¬ 
tance of the trees from the bees. 
THE POLLINATION OF THE PEACH. 
The peach also belongs to the genus 
Prunus (P. Persica). The rose-red flowers 
appear in early spring before the leaves. 
Nectar is secreted within a cup-shaped re¬ 
ceptacle and attracts both honeybees and 
wild bees. One cold rainy spring a colony 
of honeybees was placed in the center of a 
small block of peach trees so that the bees 
could easily visit the flowers. The result 
was that this orchard set all the peaches 
the trees could carry thru the following dry 
season; while other peach orchards, which 
bloomed equally well, but were without 
bees, failed to set a crop (20th An. Rep. 
Mass. Fruit-growers’ Assoc., 1914, p. 52). 
According to Fletcher, however, 2939 Gold 
Drop peach blossoms showed no benefit to 
this variety when cross-pollinated with pol¬ 
len from three other varieties. 
THE POLLINATION OF THE PEAR. 
The pollination of pear trees has been 
studied by Waite, who was the first in 
America to show that many varieties of 
orchard trees are self-sterile. In his earlier 
experiments clusters of buds were enclosed 
in bags of papers or cheese cloth which were 
not removed until the blooming period was 
over; but in his later experiments the bags 
were opened and the anthers carefully re¬ 
moved and the flowers hand-pollinated. 
There were employed in these experiments 
144 trees belonging to 38 varieties. More 
than one-half of these varieties when self- 
pollinated proved to be wholly or nearly 
self-sterile and produced little or no fruit. 
Among the wholly or nearly self-sterile 
varieties were Anjou, Bartlett, Clapp’s 
Favorite, Howell, Lawrence, and Winter 
Nelis; self-fertile varieties were Angoul- 
eme, Bose, Buffum, and Flemish Beauty. 
A brief summary of Waite’s conclusions 
is as follows: 
Pollen from another tree of the same 
variety is no more effective than pollen 
from the same tree. 
The pollen of a self-sterile variety may 
be perfectly effective when applied to an¬ 
other variety. 
Even in those varieties which can be 
self-fertilized the pollen of another variety 
is prepotent, and when insects are not 
excluded most of the fruit seems to be the 
result of crossing. 
Self-fertilized pears contain small vesti¬ 
gial seeds and are smaller and less perfect 
than those produced by crossing. 
The ineffectiveness of the pollen in self- 
sterile varieties is due to no defect in the 
pollen. 
Tn 1892 Waite visited the large pear 
orchard of the Old Dominion Fruit Com¬ 
pany near Scotland on the James River. 
The orchard consisted originally of about 
22,000 standard Bartlett pear trees. It had 
been planted some 18 years previously, but 
had never borne a full crop. The maximum 
crop was three-fifths of a peck per tree, 
while a standard Bartlett tree 12 years old 
