Now, how can a bumblebee enter this inhospitable-looking flower? If he did but know it, it keeps closed for his special benefit, having no fringes or hairs to entangle the feet of crawling pilferers, and no better way of protecting its nectar from rain and marauding butterflies that are not adapted to its needs. But he is a powerful fellow. Watch him alight on a cluster of blossoms, select the younger, nectar-bearing ones, that are distinctly marked white against a light-blue background at the mouth of the corolla for his special guidance. Old flowers from which the nectar has been removed turn deep reddish purple, and the white pathfinders become indistinct. With some difficulty, it is true, the bumblebee (B. Americanorum) thrusts his tongue through the valve of the chosen flower where the five plaited lobes overlap one another; then he pushes with all his might until his head having passed the entrance most of his body follows, leaving only his hind legs and the tip of his abdomen sticking out as he makes the circuit. He has much sense as well as muscle, and does not risk imprisonment in what must prove a tomb by a total and unnecessary disappearance within the bottle. Presently he backs out, brushes the pollen from his head and thorax into his baskets, and is off to fertilize an older, stigmatic flower with the few grains of quickening dust that must remain on his velvety head. WILD BLUE PHLOX (Phlox divaricata) Phlox family Flowers - Pale lilac blue, slightly fragrant, borne on sticky pedicels, in loose, spreading clusters. Calyx with 5 long, sharp teeth. Corolla of 5 flat lobes, indented like the top of a heart, and united into a slender tube; 5 unequal, straight, short stamens in corolla tube; 1 pistil with 3 stigmas. Stem: to 2 ft. high, finely coated with sticky hairs above, erect or spreading, and producing leafy shoots from base. Leaves: Of flowering stem - opposite, oblong, tapering to a point; of sterile shoots - oblong or egg-shaped, not pointed, 1 to 2 in. long. Preferred habitat - Moist, rocky woods. Flowering Season - April-June. Distribution - Eastern Canada to Florida, Minnesota to Arkansas. The merest novice can have no difficulty in naming the flower whose wild and cultivated relations abound throughout North America, the almost exclusive home of the genus, although it is to European horticulturists, as usual the first to see the possibilities in our native flowers, that we owe the gay hybrids in our gardens. Mr. Drummond, a collector from the Botanical Society of Glasgow, early in the thirties sent home the seeds of a species from Texas, which became the ancestor of the gorgeous annuals, the Drummond phloxes of commerce today; and although he died of fever in Cuba before the plants became generally known, not even his kinsman, the author of "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," has done more to immortalize the family name.