Birds and All Nature, Vol 7, No. 3, March 1900: Illustrated by Color PhotographyVarious
History
Birds and All Nature, Vol 7, No. 3, March 1900: Illustrated by Color Photography
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
BEES.--Honey is made from many substances. Not only do the flowers give
up their nectar to the honey bees, but various other sources of sweets
are visited by bees with profit. Clover honey is one of the most common
kind, although it is all white clover honey, for the honey bee has too
short a tongue to reach into the long tubes of the red clover which the
bumble-bees are so fond of. Sweet-clover yields nectar which makes good
honey. A dark variety of honey comes from the flowers of buckwheat, and
the basswood tree which the German poets sing about, calling it by the
name of linden, bears such a wealth of flowers which the honey bees
like that it is swarmed day after day by so many bees that the tree
seems to hum with pleasure. You can often hear the bees in a basswood
tree before the tree itself is in view in the forest. Orange trees are
also favorites with the honey-makers.
Broken fruits are often sucked by bees to get material for honey, and
cider left in a dish where they can get at it will be visited by them.
A mixture of almost any sweet liquid will attract honey bees, and they
are so careless of its exact nature that they have been known to store
up and make into honey substances that are not good for human beings
to eat. One of the favorite forms of adulteration among those who keep
bees for profit is to place glucose and water where they can get at it.
They will readily fill their combs with this cheap material and seem
to do very much more work in the course of a season by having placed
within easy reach a mass of material that they do not have to work for.
Margaret Warner Morley, in her charming little book, "The Bee People,"
which has just come from the press of A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago,
tells how bees frequently make honey from "honey dew." This is a sweet
and sticky substance that is found upon the upper side of all sorts of
leaves in some localities and has caused a great deal of wonder as to
where it comes from. The writer tells of the mountain children she saw
in the Carolinas plucking these leaves and licking the honey-dew from
them, enjoying their treat much as city children enjoy what they get at
the candy store. She says the honey-dew is made by the little insects
called ants' cows or aphides. The sweet liquid is thrown out from their
bodies, and ants are so fond of it that some of them have been said to
keep "cows" and take great care of them in order to enjoy the sweet
they get from their bodies.
The aphides eat the juice of the leaves they rest on and change it into
honey-dew. Resting on the under side of a leaf and feasting royally,
they become so full that the honey-dew spurts from their bodies and
showers the upper sides of the leaves below. Sometimes the insects are
so thick upon the leaves of a magnolia tree that a shower of sweets
comes down upon its lower leaves and the grass below. Trees and bushes
shine with the dew, and when dust settles upon the sticky surfaces it
is decidedly disagreeable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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