BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
The greater part of nectar is water, which reaches the surface from within the plant cells. To do this it must pass through walls that are little, if at all, cuticularized, or it must break through the cuticle. This does not mean that it must break through the entire cell-wall; a small part if this is modified by the protoplasm into a gum or mucilage, or some similar substance, and the water accumulates in this layer and swells it until the overlying cuticle is burst. Some form of sugar is a frequent result of this disintegration of cellulose. Dissolved sugars pass through the ordinary cellulose wall, but they do not pass through the ordinary surface layer of protoplasm in the outer cells.
When water is separated from a solution like that of sugar by a filter of this sort, which allows water to pass but is not permeable to the dissolved substance, the action is set up that physicists call osmosis, and water accumulates on the side of the dissolved substance until it exercises a very considerable pressure. This action not only bursts the cuticle, when it starts beneath it, but results in a flow of water within the plant at that point.
The absorbing roots of plants show another result of this physical property, osmosis. They are not waterproofed; water is continuous through them, from the thin layer in which it occurs about particles of the soil, to the water which composes a great part of the weight of the protoplasm within the cells. This sap of the root cells contains dissolved sugar and other osmotic substances. Osmotic absorption by the roots results in a pressure of several atmospheres. This pressure, passed from cell to cell, gives the crispness to fresh celery. Its loss, through evaporation from the leaves, results in the loss of this crispness, or wilting.
When evaporation is slight, as in a saturated atmosphere, water exudes at the surface through pores such as occurs at the tip of a young grass or clover leaf. Water pores of this sort are common. They are regarded as pressure-valves by many botanists. The water that they eliminate is usually filtered by the protoplasm that it passes through, which does not allow the passage of substances dissolved in the cell sap; but some plants which grow where they absorb very "hard" water pass lime salts out through their water pores to such an extent that they are encrusted with lime as the water evaporates.
Part of flower of Geoxinum pyreneicen. (\(\pi\)) nectries; (cf) stanents. Greatly magnified. Cogel from Bousier's "Les Nectaires."
The safety-valve elimination of water under strong internal pressure and lessened normal evaporation is hardly to be called excretion or accretion; the extruded water is neither by-product nor manufactured output. The elimination of lime appears to be on the border line of excretion.
Nectar is not merely water; if it were its production would be more easily understood. To the taste, it is sweet; to the sense of smell, it is often fragrant; occasionally it is poisonous; often it is somewhat colored. Commonly it is very fluid, but in the nectar-cups of poinsettia it becomes very gummy. These properties come from substances--sugars, volatile oils, poisonous organic compounds--that were made by and in the plant, and they differ in different kinds of plants. Whatever bees or ants may do in changing nectar into honey, they do not entirely change or remove tilese substances, and the rank brown honey of the drug store is as easily run to its source as the popular white clover honey, the daintily flavored product of western alfalfa, the aromatic acid honey of the red raspberry, or the greenish product of the sweet clover with its delicate vanilla-like aroma, the cumarin source of which shows itself in an occasional head-ache, much as the minor organic constituents of some honey derived from the heath family now and then prove seriously poisonous.
A fluid that contains these organic substances necessarily falls into the category of excretions or secretions, according as it represents waste or usable material. As either excretion or secretion it is the product of specialized organs, glands, and its appearance marks these glands as in action or performing their function. Whatever else may be involved, this depends upon the activity of their protoplasm, or is controlled by it. When this is killed, secretion or excretion stops.
All parts of plants are composed of individual cells flattened against one another. This figure copied from Honnier's "Les Nectaires," exhibits a longitudinal section of a stamen in Cofussia biorior. Magnified. At left (341) cross section of filament.
One result of the protean character of protoplasm is its different behavior in different plants, different organs of the same plant or different phases of the activity of an individual cell. In either case it can perform its functions only between certain limits of environment _and it performs them best somewhere between these limits. For each function and each condition there is what physiologists call a minimum--below which it is not carried on, a maximum--above which it has stopped, and an optimum--or most favorable. Just as in the efficient working of a human factory, power and raw materials are necessary, and workmen must be onto the job, however favorable the other conditions of manufacture may be.
The secretion of nectar and the storing of honey are consequently not quite comparable, for the activities of the honey plant are concerned with the first, and the activities of the bee are concerned with the second, though these are largely influenced by what the plant is or is not doing. This must be remembered always when comparing such records of honey-storing as Mr. Strong's careful hive-weighings through a generation, with Mr. Kenoyer's quantitative measurements of nectar secretion.
Nevertheless, the most favoring conditions of nectar secretion and honey storing agree in a number of respects. Vigorous early development of the plant puts it in condition to do its share of the work best; whatever conditions may prevail during what for most plants is a very short part of the growing season, when it is in bloom. Vigorous early development of the hive bears the same kind of relation to the final result. Early honey must be stored before the bees have reached the full strength of the season, which may have something to do with the fact that the bulk of the harvest is gleaned from plants that flower later or continue to flower for a relatively long time.
Mr. Strong's observations in Iowa show that over half of the net increase in honey storage in southern Iowa is made in June, and over four-fifths in June and July. These are the months when the most productive nectar plants flower, and the hives have reached the crest of their speculative activity and are undergoing division by that time.
Physiological studies show that the afternoon temperature for nectar secretion is high--between 90 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Observation on the hive shows that its workers are at their active best in moderately hot weather. Mr. Strong's twenty-nine-year average shows that over half of the average honey for the year is stored when the daily maximum is between 80 and 90 degrees, and nine-tenths of it is stored when the high temperature of the day is between 80 and 90 degrees. Nectar is most abundantly secreted, other conditions being equal, in warm days following cool nights; bees do not seem usually to work more actively on such days, though a record day for heather honey in England began with a frost. Damp air increases the quantity of nectar, as of the expulsion of water through water pores; but dull, rainy weather lessens or stops the activity of the bees.
Nuptial nectar is secreted chiefly before or during the period of sexual maturity of the flowers. Many, like cotton, golden currant and horse-chestnut, change color as this period of sexual functioning and maximum nectar secretion passes, and bees often are quick to catch the signal. Extra-nuptial nectar is secreted in greatest quantity while the near-by flowers and foliage of the plant are young.
Nectar differs from time to time in quality as well as in quantity. In damp weather the increased quantity commonly causes a greater dilution of its content of sugar, and the bees have been shown to store a greater weight of honey several days after a rainy day than immediately following it. Though the greater part of nectar is water, its essential part, for the bee-man, is sugar, chiefly a mixture of two kinds of sugar, that possess a different molecular arrangement though containing the same number of carbon, hydrogen and starch atoms, which causes them to behave differently when examined by polarized light, and materially affects other of their physical properties.
The flow of the water of nectar seems to be like that of water through water pores, an infiltration under pressure when root-absorption is least active and leaf evaporation checked; but thoroughly and repeatedly washing the glands sometimes puts a stop to it. Beating rain does this as effectively as experimental washing. Change of position and closing in dark, rainy weather characterize some flowers, and keep the rain from washing away their accumulated nectar and checking its replenishment. This was Sprengel's explanation of the fringe of hair on the petals of the wild geranium. In proportion as such nectar guards are effective, they preserve the supply and contribute to its continuance, in proportion as rain has opportunity to beat upon the nectar glands it wastes and may even check the production of nectar.
This stopping of nectar flow by washing away the secretion of the glands, is connected with the affinity for water of sugars. The flow of water appears to be started by the osmotic force of the disintegrated part of the walls of the secreting cells; it is stopped when the resulting substance has been removed from the outer surface of the secreting cells.
Stosista on nectariferous tissue of _Xaathiecerus zorbifolds_, Greatly magnined, Copied from Bonnier's "Les Nectaires."
If this were all, unless the degenerating cellulose were replenished in sufficient quantity there would hardly be such a thing as honey production. Indeed, some extra-nuptial glands secrete a nectar containing so little sugar that even ants may not be attracted by it--as is said to be the case with climbing smartweeds cultivated in England, though it is not usually true of such plants growing wild here, where they are at home. Commonly, however, the sugar in nectar is replenished while the secretion of fluid continues.
The passage out of sugar from a living cell is very different from the escape of water; the latter may result from pressure on the one hand or osmotic draft on the other, because the outer protoplasm is permeable to water but not to sugar. When sugar is secreted, this protoplasmic layer becomes to a greater or less degree permeable to the escaping sugar. This is one phase of the activity of the living protoplasm, for secretion is a vital phenomenon. What greater or less permeability of protoplasm actually consists in is a matter of theory rather than observation, but the phenomenon is a subject of observation and experiment. Alternating warmth and cold, within limits, affect it; it has its optimum, at a rather high temperature, as well as its minimum and maximum. Through an adequately permeable membrane, the flow of either water or sugar may be outwards--as it is in normal secretion, or inwards--when the secretion is absorbed--as experiments show to be true under some conditions.
Water for nectar secretion is obtained in the first place through the roots of the plant and travels from the point of absorption to the point of secretion. Sugar for nectar secretion is manufactured within the plant, very close to the point where it is secreted. It is primarily a product of the carbon-fixing or photo-synthetic activity that marks green plants as the food-makers of the world. Sugars appear to be among the earliest-formed of such carbon-containing or organic substances in the plant; but usually they are changed into starch for storage, and this is subsequently digested or transformed into a soluble sugar when the time of its use comes. The cells about some nectar glands are storage repositories of sugar; in other cases they accumulate a reserve of starch, as raw material, before their activities begin in, supplying sugar.
Evidently, back of the nectar-production of a given day or season, very closely related to its own optimum conditions of temperature and humidity, lies the earlier vegetation of the nectar-producing plants. Strength and vigor of growth, a good reserve of stored food from the year before, cr favorable spring season, these would seem logically to affect the activity of the plant in performing this as well as others of its functions.
kenoyer's conclusions, from Strong's honey-gathering statistics, give support to this expectation: "There is an evident alteration between good and poor years," as in apple production; "a good year has a rainfall slightly above the average, preceded by an autumn, winter and spring with more than the average precipitation," affording adequate and lasting soil moisture; "a rainy May scarcely fails to precede a good honey season," for the same reason," a cold winter has no detrimental effect on the yield of the succeeding season, but a cold March reduces it," through preventing a fair early growth of the honey plants; "a winter of heavy snowfall, in the great majority of cases, is followed by a larger honey yield," because of its contribution to the soil moisture and the protection afforded the plants during their hibernation.
Of these conclusions, most bear directly on the conditions favorable for nectar secretion by the plants; some bear as directly on those favorable for the wintering in prime condition of the bees. Honey production rests upon both, not only in June and July and on individual days in those
**PIGEON BERRY, see Buckthorn.**
**PIGEON CHERRY, see Wild Cherry.**
**PIN CLOVER or FILAREE (Erodium cicutarium).**
The pin clover, or alfilaria, or filarec, is widely distributed in the Old World, and in this country has been naturalized from Europe. It is especially well known on the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to southern California. There it is said to be one of the most valuable wild pasture plants.
It is also called pin grass and heron's bill. It has a long period of bloom, beginning in February or March in California, and in some places continuing through the summer. It produces an abundance of pollen and considerable honey of good quality. In Gray's botany it is listed as "storksbill," and is mentioned as scarce in New York and Pennsylvania. It is recorded as occurring in Alabama, where it apparently was carried with railroad ballast. June is given as the blooming period in the vicinity of Mobile.
It is also known in several places in Connecticut, where it is said to bloom in May and June. Professor Pammel states that it is abundant in the dry soils in the Salt Lake basin and from Colorado to Texas. The seeds cling to the wool of sheep and this aids in its wide distribution.
Figure 110 shows the plant with blossom and seed pod. It is from the peculiar shape of the latter that it gets the name of "storksbill" and "heron's bill."
**PINE (Pinus).**
Occasionally honeydew is reported from the pine trees. The following references are typical of those to be found in current literature:
"We are having a real flow of water-white honeydew from the pine here in Polk County. It has been on now for two weeks. Bees in general are in bad condition."--Luther Presswood, Reliance, Tenn., Jan. 18, 1907. American Bee Journal, page 98, 1907.
"Large quantities of honey are often secured from pine woods in certain parts of Germany. The honey is nearly black in color, still it finds many admirers, and must, therefore, be of better quality than the honeydew gathered here at times. The Emmendingen Beekepers' Society furnishes all the honey for the Grand Duke's table (in Karlsruhe), and it is specified that the honey must be this black honey of the pine woods."--Rztg. for Schlesw.--Holstein, American Bee Journal, page 616, 1906.
Similar honeydew is harvested in Switzerland and appears to be also much prized by the consumers.
**PLUM (Prunus).**
Plums, both wild and cultivated, are important sources of nectar over most of the United States. There are twenty or more species which are native to North America and which are generally known as wild plums. The blooming period comes early and with other tree fruits they are of great value as the source of nectar and pollen at a season when the colomies most need stimulation. The nectar yield is sufficiently abundant for the bees to store surplus where colonies are strong and weather conditions favorable. In Sacramento County, California, surplus is sometimes reported from prunes. There are probably few places where bees are kept in America where plums of some variety are not present.
**POINSETTIA (Euphoria pulcherrima).** -The poinsettia is a well-known ornamental plant. It is a shrub, native to tropical America, grown to a considerable extent for ornamental purposes in California. The blossons are small and inconspicuous, but there is a striking cluster of brilliant red leaves, surrounding the flowers, which give an impression of flowers.
The nectaries are very conspicuous cups at the side of the blossoms. Nectar is secreted in abundance, and if the plant was sufficiently common it would be an important source. The nectar gathers in large drops.
**POISON IVY, see Laurel; also Sumac. POISON OAK, see Sumac.**
**POISONOUS HONEY.**
Much has been written in regard to poisonous honey. Well authenti
Figure 111: Plum blossons.
cated cases of serious poisoning from honey are rare, so rare, indeed, that many persons doubt whether such cases occur. There are persons with a peculiar susceptibility to honey from any source. To such, honey may seem to be poisonous, which can be eaten by others without any ill effect. Prof. A. J. Cook, writing in the American Bee Journal (October 12, 1905, page 711), mentioned having on several occasions received samples of so-called poisonous honey, which he are without inconvenience.
In December, 1880, issue of American Bee Journal, page 532, a case is mentioned where a native of New Zealand died from eating honey gathered from the wharnagi bush **(Melicope ternata)**, which is said to be one of the two poisonous plants to be found in New Zealand. The symptoms are reported similar to strychnine poisoning. A letter from New Zealand published in Gleanings, page 435, 1908, reads as follows:
"Some one, usually a native, gets poisoned every year about here through eating bush honey, usually not capped, and puka-puka usually gets the blame. Mr. Hopkins had a look at a case of Moaris honey poisoning last year, and I think puka-puka got the blame; but the fact is significant, nevertheless, that it is the Maoris only, or principally they, that get poisoned, and in that case the honey eaten is never capped."-Stephen Anthony, Wastete, New Zealand.
The mountain laurel **(Kalmia latifolia)** is the plant most frequently reported as yielding poisonous honey. This shrub is common to the mountain regions of the Eastern States, and it would seem that cases of poisoning would be reported much more frequently if there was good reason to suspect the honey from this source. It is a well-known fact that disagreeable odors disappear from honey that is well ripened. In this connection a writer in American Bee Journal, page 664, 1884, suggests that there is no evidence of poisoning from well ripened honey. He further states that uncapped honey from the yellow jasmine is actually poisonous and has produced death, but that after it is capped there is no honey more wholesome. It should be noted that special emphasis was placed on the fact that the cases of poisoning in New Zealand were from eating uncapped honey.
Pammel states (Manual of Poisonous Plants) that honey obtained from **Euphoria margina,** the well-known snow-on-the-mountain, is poisonous and unfit for use. He also states that the Indians of Brazil use honey gathered by wasps from flowers of **Serjonia lethalis** for poisoning their arrows, and also as a fish poison. It contains a narcotic poison which causes death.
The following resume of the subject is copied entire from Pammel:
"Prof. Lyman F. Kebler, who has made a somewhat extended investigation with poisonous honey has given an excellent bibliography with reference to the early literature on the subject. It has been known for centuries that the honey collected from **Ericaceae** acts as a narcotic irritant, producing giddiness, vomiting and purging. Poisonous honey was described by Xenophon. He gives a fairly accurate description of how the soldiers of his army acted that are honey that was poisoned. He states that they lost their senses, vomited and were affected with purging, and those who had eaten but little were in toxicated, but when they had eaten much they were like mad men. Strabo and Pliny spoke of poisonous honey, the latter writer, an early naturalist noted for his accurate observations, records poisonous honey, which he called "acogleethron" (goat's death), which bees collected at Heraclea. He gives a description of the honey, which is said to have had a peculiar smell and produced sneezing. It is generally supposed that this honey came from a species of **Rhododen-dron, the R. pontica.** This and allied species are the chief source of poisonous honey in Asia and Asia Minor, but it may he said in this connection that honey collected from the heather in Scotland is not poisonous.
"Barton, an early American botanist, reported poisonous honey in New Jersey as early as 1794. Subsequently Coleman reported a large number of cases in 1852, and Gammer, in Gleanings in Bee Culture, and several writers in the American Bee Journal, reported poisonous honey. Other writers, like Chestnut and Crawford, have reported on the occurrence of poisonous honey in the United States, and Kebler reports no less than eight cases for New Jersey in 1896, and believes that it is much more common than the records seem to indicate. Kebler was fortunate enough to investigate some of the poisonous honey following a case of poisoning in New Jersey. He examined a part of the comb of the dark honey which had a light brown color and a nauseating odor, pungent taste, caused a burning sensation in the back of the month similar to that of aconite. Persons who particok of a small amount of this honey began to cough immediately. He also made a chemical analysis of the non-suspicious honey, digesting with alcohol, then evaporated, the residue was again treated to alcohol and evaporated and administered to two cats. One received a small dose and the other a large one. The results from the cats were so interesting that I quote from Professor Kebler:
"The small dose produced partial exhaustion, relaxation of the voluntary muscles and general depression. The large dose in a short time produced restlessness, vomiting, purging, prostration and almost complete loss of the voluntary muscles, showing that the honey contained a prompt and potent poison. The animal could scarcely be induced to move, and when motion was attempted, first the fore-limbs would fail, and then the back-limbs would give way. First one portion of the body would sway in one direction, then the other portion in another _reminding one of a highly intoxated person. Had the entire dose been retained, death undoubtedly would have followed. As it was, the cat had regained her normal condition only at the end of twenty-four hours."
Along with this we may append the symptoms as reported by the physician who attended the persons who were poisoned: