The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-12-29
(Mail Special to the Advertiser

| 81 OhANE. w dSH.. Lee. ID INV
the bee a chance and it will literally
break the boughs of your trees with tn,
weight of fruit. -
Frank G. Odell of Lincoln, Neb., bee
master, who gave series of demon
STATIONS with $4,000 bees at the Ma
tional Apple Show in Spokane, Deeem
Der to II, made the foregoing obser
walton in the course of an interview
discussing bee-keeping and scientific
! agriculture and fruit growing. He said
'FThe bee is the expert assistant of
the hortieulturist and the farmer. So
5, indispensable are its functions in the
pollination of fruits, vegetables, cereals
! and grasses that its activities may be
said to lie at the foundation of all sue
cessful agriculture. Nature has ordain-
ed one supreme law, that of creation,
| the perpetuation of the race type This
law, universal in its application and alb
solutely Identical in its form, obtains
in the plant world as in the animal
world. The luscious pulp of the fruit
is the envelope, the package, the strong
box, devised by nature to protect the
seed within from injury and render it
susceptible of termination so that the
type may be reproduced IN all its per
lection.
''The bee, like other insects, effects
incidental pollination of flowers in its
search for nectar; but its great value
to the fruit grower lies in this, that it
goes to the flowers specifically to gather
pollen, literally by the carload, in the
hairy baskets on its legs, fastening
from bloom to bloom, rolling and pack
ing and literally rioting in the golden
dust, pregnant with the microscopic
germs of plant life, until the golden pei
lets are packed away in it's hairy bas
kets, to be carried to the hive for stor-
age as an indispensable portion of the
food of its young during the wirter
months to come.
cit requires no expert knowledge to
comprehend how perfectly the bee thus
performs the Office of pollination. In
ded, it is nature s chief agent in this i'm
work No seed, no fruit,
is the universal law Here is the only
insect useful in all it's habits, having
a fixed habitation accessible to man, de-
pendent upon the pollen of every va
riety of flower as an indispensable por |
ton of the food of its young, and going |
to the bloom specifically to gather that !
pollen, thus making possible the mar |
velous fruit crops in Washington and |
the Pacific Northwest That is why |
say, give the bee chance and it will |
literally break the boughs of your trees
with the weight of fruit.
"Delve into the realm of applied me-
chanies or structural engineering and
your research is incomplete until les
son is conned from the structure of the
with its marvellous strength
as compared with the fragile nature of
It's fabric No more marvellous struc-
,ure exists among the myriad marvellous
works of nature This waxen fabric,
derived primarily from liquid honey
into wax in that marvellous
laboratory of the bee, formed by some
mysterious instinct or intelligence into /
he very form of all others designed |
for economy of materials, space and !
of strength, passes beyond
he measure of human skill in its per
lection.
Somewhere between 1744 and 1868
t was discovered that wax is produced
between the plates on the lower side of
he worker bees abdomen It was John
Hunter, the celebrated anatomist who
discovered just how the bees secrete
wax, and thereby settled a vexed ques-
ion. He communicated his discovery
n paper read to the Royal Society of
london, February %, 1898.
"Wax is produced at the will of the
zee, and when called for by the neces-
ity of the hive. The wax-producing
'ees obtain a somewhat higher temper
ture, usually by close clustering,
hough they sometimes hang in slender
estoons and chains.
"Wax is not chemically fat or
.lyceride, and those who have called it
the fat of bees have grossly erred;
ret it is nearly allied to the fats in h
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