If you will watch a bumble-bee closely as she crawls over the stamens of a wild rose, perhaps you can see that, although she covers the whole under part of her body with pollen, yet she scrapes off all she can with her feet and packs it in a yellow mass on the smooth, hairless segments of her large hind legs, the pollen plates as they are called. To make the pollen stick on these smooth plates and hang together during the flight to the nest, it is claimed by Muller that the bee mixes nectar with the pollen grains. The kind of pollen that she gathers is, however, not generally the dusty kind, like the pollen of the pines or grasses, but the sticky kind that comes from insect-fertilized flowers. When the bumble-bee reaches her nest, she scrapes the pollen from the pollen basket and with it feeds the young, for pollen is the solid food of baby bees. There is one strange thing about these smooth pollen plate legs which, from our human, individualistic point of view, is hard to understand. It is only the workers, the undeveloped females, which have them; the legs of the males and of the queens are hairy and are not at all adapted for pollen gathering. Thus, since workers bear no children, we see a race of parents transmitting to certain of their offspring characters which neither they nor any of their ancestors have ever possessed. [Illustration] THE BUMBLE-BEE AT WORK This photograph shows the great hybridizer at work. She is on one of the single roses, her hairy body spread over the stamens which, with their yellow anthers, look like a circular bed of tulips. In the middle of the circle, where her right foot rests, is the stigma. If you will sometime take a hand lens and watch a bee at work (and if you don't get too close she will pay no attention to you), you will notice the clumsy way she crawls about, knocking the pollen off the stamens and getting her body covered with the yellow dust. As you watch, any feeling of there being some mystery about cross fertilization will be dispelled. How this same bumble-bee could crawl across another rose blossom _without_ leaving a trail of yellow pollen on its stigma would be the mystery! Since the earliest days of the world of plants and insects, the bumble-bee and her ancestors have been at work mixing the pollen on hundreds of different plants and playing, doubtless, a perfectly gigantic role in the creation of the flowering plants which now cover vast areas of the globe. It is perhaps an idle speculation, but it would be interesting to know how many plants would become extinct were some disease or parasite to exterminate the bees. [Illustration] THE TELLTALE MILKWEED POLLEN (_Bombus sp._)