The Flower and the Bee; Plant Life and Pollination (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... IX NOCTURNAL OR HAWK-MOTH FLOWERS FLOWERS which bloom in darkness seem weird and unnatural. Most conspicuous blossoms are creatures of sunshine and warmth, and seek to allure diurnal insects, while many of them close at the approach of night. But nocturnal flowers are adapted to pollination by moths, chiefly hawk-moths. How this reciprocal relation became established it would be hard to tell; but their forms, time of opening, and colors easily distinguish them from the day-bloomers. Consider, for instance, the thorn-apples (Datura), which have long, slender corolla tubes some six inches in length. (Fig. 65.) They are "children of the dewy moonlight," and fill the evening air with their sweet fragrance. Their large, pale, salvershaped blossoms "serenely drooping awaken visions of silent awe," and it is at once apparent that these stately flowers do not invite the visits of bees. Some fifty years ago Felicia Hemans was a popular poet in New England, and while she probably knew nothing of the mysteries of flower-pollination, in her lines to Datura arborea she instinctively recognizes the fact that bees are not found in this domain of shadows: "Majestic plant such dreams as lie Nursed, where the bee sucks in the cowslip's bell, Are not thy train: ---those flowers of vase-like swell, ... worthy, carved by plastic hand, Above some kingly poet's tomb to shine In spotless marble." In their relations to flowers moths may be divided into two groups, the highly specialized hawk-moths (Sp/iingidce) and the other moth families. Many moths fly only on the rainiest and darkest nights. We should like to know more of the devious ways of these nocturnal wanderers amid the down-pouring rain. They seem a bit uncanny. Among the...