The many plants usually styled sun-flowers, because of their resemblance to our cultivated plants of that name, which deck the hill-side, meadow and marsh-land, now unfurl their showy involucres, and open their modest corollas, to invite the myriad insects to sip the precious nectar which each of the clustered flowers secretes. Our cultivated sun-flowers, I think, are indifferent honey plants, though some think them big with beauty, and their seeds are relished by poultry. But the asters (Fig. 100), so wide-spread, the beggar-ticks, _Bidens_, and Spanish-needles of our marshes, the tick-seed, _Coreopsis_, also, of the low, marshy places, with hundreds more of the great family Compositæ, are replete with precious nectar, and with favorable seasons make the apiarist who dwells in their midst jubilant, as he watches the bees, which fairly flood the hives with their rich and delicious honey. In all of this great family, the flowers are small and inconspicuous, clustered in compact heads, and when the plants are showy with bloom, like the sun-flowers, the brilliancy is due to the involucre, or bracts which serve as a frill to decorate the more modest flowers. I have thus mentioned the most valuable honey plants of our country. Of course there are many omissions. Let all apiarists, by constant observation, help to fill up the list. BOOK ON BOTANY. I am often asked what books are best to make apiarists botanists. I am glad to answer this question, as the study of botany will not only be valuable discipline, but will also furnish abundant pleasure, and more, give important practical information. Gray's Lessons, and Manual of Botany, in one volume, published by Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co., New York, is the most desirable treatise on this subject. PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS. It will pay well for the apiarist to decorate his grounds with soft and silver maples, for their beauty and early bloom. If his soil is rich, sugar maples and lindens may well serve a similar purpose. The Judas tree, too, and tulip trees, both North and South, may well be made to ornament the apiarist's home. For vines, obtain the wistarias. Sow and encourage the sowing of Alsike clover and silver-leaf buckwheat in your neighborhood. Be sure that your wife, children and bees, can often repair to a large bed of the new giant or grandiflora mignonette, and remember that it, with cleome and borage, blooms till frost. Study the bee plants of your region, and then study the above table, and provide for a succession, remembering that the mustards, rape and buckwheat may be made to bloom almost at pleasure, by sowing at the proper time. Don't forget that borage and the mustards seem comparatively indifferent to wet weather. Be sure that all waste places are stocked with motherwort, catnip, asters, etc. (See Appendix, page 289).