They think they are just doing their duty in gathering nectar to make honey and pollen for bee-flour, but in dipping their heads down into the deep calyx where the nectar is stored, they get their furry bodies covered with pollen, and when they come out of that flower, or go to visit another, they spread pollen all over the stigma of the pistil! And when the pollen is spread on the stigma of the pistil, somehow, in some wonderful way it sinks down through the style into the ovary where the dear little seed baby is born. If you cut open an old bloom going to seed you will see a number of seed babies in the ovary from which they will fall when they are ripe. BUMBLE BEES HELP Sometimes flowers are very particular as to just what insect shall do this work for them. For instance, the clover hides its nectar too deep for the honey bee’s tongue to reach; so the bumble bee and butterfly do most of the work of pollination for the clovers. The little butter-and-eggs flower depends upon bumble bees, too, to bring pollen to the pistil, for she closes the nectar holder with so tight a lip that the weight of the honey bee is not heavy enough to open it. ANIMALS WOULD STARVE WITHOUT THIS WORK OF INSECTS By the way, it is a dreadful thing to kill bumble bees. They do the work of pollenizing for many a deep-cupped flower, and _without their aid and the aid of some such insects, everybody would starve_, for there would be no seed and no new plants to take the place of the old ones as they died, and animals and birds and mankind would perish of starvation. MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES HELP, TOO This work of pollenizing depends for the most part on bees, but many butterflies and moths feed on nectar in the same way. Most moths’ tongues are very long, and many long-necked flowers depend upon them to bring pollen on their soft, furry bodies to the pistils. The moths fly at night, so many long-necked flowers, like the moonflowers, do not open their blooms nor shed their sweet odors in the day time, but wait to show their sweetness until their favorite insect is flying. Now you see that Beauty Butterfly and night moths are not just a gorgeous bit of living color. Such moths and Beauty Butterfly accomplish much good. “Well, Miss Gardener said she lay out in the hammock, just as you are lying, Mary Frances, studying just what I have told you, only in a much more difficult way, and she kept saying over and over to herself, ‘Corolla, calyx, sepals, stamens, pistil,’ in order that she might know her lesson, when all at once her book began to slip out of her hand and she could not seem to cling to it at all. She heard the dull thud as it hit the ground.” “Are you ready?” asked a strange buzzy voice. “I’m always in a hurry, you see. Are you quite ready?”