HONEY PLANTS 
509 
cession of honey plants should also be 
considered. In California, after the orange 
trees have ceased to bloom, the bees if 
moved to the sages will get honey from 
that source if it is a season when they yield 
honey. After the sages comes the Lima bean. 
More information about the honey plants 
of foreign countries should be obtained. 
Who can say what happy surprises Africa, 
Asia, and the Pacific islands may yet af¬ 
ford the beekeeper? It should not be for¬ 
gotten that sweet clover, alfalfa, pin clover, 
borage, eucalyptus, horehound, carrot, cat¬ 
nip, wild marjoram, thyme, and red, alsike, 
and crimson clovers are all introduced 
plants. Our agricultural and horticultural 
explorers are successfully seeking new 
fruits, grains, and flowers; but do they 
ever look for new honey plants? 
The possibilities of artificial pasturage 
are only partially recognized. In many 
localities the apiarist might greatly in¬ 
crease the number of nectariferous flowers 
by sowing each season a few pounds of 
sweet clover in waste places and along the 
roadside. There are many plants which 
produce paying crops, and are at the same 
time valuable to the apiarist, such as cot¬ 
ton, alfalfa, mustard, buckwheat, clovers, 
the orange, and a great variety of fodder 
plants and fruit trees. When it is remem¬ 
bered that more than one-half of the prin¬ 
cipal honey plants of Florida are arboreal, 
and that many shade and timber trees yield 
nectar freely, there would seem to be good 
reason to expect that in the future forestry 
and bee culture may be united. 
By hybridization and selection many new 
varieties of fruits and flowers have been 
originated; and the laws of heredity and 
breeding are studied more zealously today 
than ever before in the history of biology. 
Why should not plants, especially those 
valuable for fruits and seeds, be developed 
with a greater capability for secreting nec¬ 
tar? Insects have shown us what is possi¬ 
ble in this direction. It is probable that 
there would have been very few nectar- 
producing flowers but for their agency. 
There may yet be an apple tree that, in 
addition to excellent fruit, will yield nectar 
as freely as does the orange or basswood. 
The orchardist of the next century may 
obtain a crop of honey from fruit bloom 
which will rival in value the later harvest 
of fruit. No effort has yet been made in 
this direction, and many of the achieve¬ 
ments of the horticultural experimenter ap¬ 
pear to have offered greater difficulties. 
There may yet be plants of which it may 
literally be said that they flow with nectar. 
POLLEN PLANTS. 
Probably no factor was more important 
in determining the development of the 
families of bees than the rise of the 
habit of feeding their brood on pollen. 
The wasps feed their young on animal 
food, and had the ancestors of the bees, 
which were wasp-like insects, continued to 
use the same kind of food for brood-rear¬ 
ing,. the bees would never have come into 
existence. Deprived of pollen at the pres¬ 
ent time the bees would speedily disappear. 
There is nothing in Nature which can be 
used as a satsfactory substitute for pollen, 
altho bees sometimes collect the spores of 
fungi and mosses to a small extent. Pollen 
famines occur in Australia, when the brood 
dies in the hive, and no artificial substitute 
gives satisfactory results. The same scar¬ 
city of pollen occurs in the tupelo region 
of Florida, in southern Alabama, and in 
parts of Texas. It is highly important, 
therefore, that the beekeeper should be fa¬ 
miliar with the sources of pollen, on which 
the bees in his apiary are dependent for 
brood-rearing. 
Of the true flowering plants called an- 
giosperms, because they have their seeds 
enclosed in a seed case, and receive the pol¬ 
len on a prepared surface known as the 
stigma, there have been described in North 
America north of Mexico about 14,600 spe¬ 
cies. Of this number, at least 3000 are 
nectarless, but of necessity produce pollen. 
Very many of them have small green or 
dull-colored flowers, and are pollinated by 
the wind, as the alders, birches, poplars, 
elins, beeches, oaks, and hickories; the 
grasses, sedges, and rushes; many homely 
weeds like pigweeds, ragweeds, nettles, 
pondweeds, sorrels, hemp, and meadow rue. 
Usually the stamens and pistils are in sep¬ 
arate flowers, which are borne on the same 
plant (monoecious), or on different plants 
(dioecious). They are commonly without 
nectar, since they depend on the wind for 
pollination; but they produce great quan- 
