Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1922-07-14
COMMON SENSE COMMENT
Georgia Expert BlsCusSesfha TO.SOn'
inq Problem.
rs AGAINST THE MOLASSES METHOD
Necessary to Ensure Fruitfulness
Not Only of Cotton But Of All Other
Plants. Including Trees.

Plants, Including Trees.
\. L. Willet in Augusta Chronicle.
A man said TO me this week "SGme
Of my neighbors uaed on the small
cotton with three or four leaves mo-
lasses but nobody in my nCighborhood
is or will use moasses on big cotton.
Another man said MY whole neighbor-
hood has lost through moiasses poison
ing all of her bees" I reported last
week one big bee mau as having lost
all of his and another man ten days
ago who had lost all of his, even more
than fifty hives. Another man
brought me Saturday cotton boil
with n cotton boil worm in it and said
that his cotton was badly infested with
them.
MoIasses or PolIenization-Which?
The molasses method is almost
wholly a local Augusta section mat
ter. Without any doubt the question
today is shall it be molasses or pole
niZation insects?' The principal in
dustry in Turkey is the Smyrna fig,
but the Smyrna fig brought to Cali
.fornia wouldn't reproduce there unit!
a very small insect from Turkey that
pollenizes this fig was imported. y
large number of our flowers and
practically all of our orchard flowers
have their polleniZation done not by
the wind nor by polarization but
by bees and other nectar seeking in
sects. These nectar seeking insects
are today being annihilated by
molasscs in wholesale quantities and
if molasses is kept up we may expect
them all to be wiped out.
Cross Polarization.
These insects not only pollenize
plants but they do something even
more important, perhaps, that is, they
cross fcrtilize or cross pollenize-this
being the opposite OF what the farmer
knows as n-breeding. In-breeding is
just as injurious to. plants as to ami
mails. Cross polarization, that is.
bringing pollen from one plant to
another plant, freshens and strength
ems and invigorates and vitaliZes and
keeps up the strain. Cross fertiliza-
ton is impossible except by insects in
all bell-shaped fowcrs-and this is
the usual flower. These nectar in
sects were given q special commission
by the Creator. This has been
acknowledged for centuries. The Of
flee of these little insects is well
known The man who spreads mo-
lasses poison around surely must carry
little thought in his mind as to what
he really is doing. Is it to be mo-
lasses or is it to be a dminution and
a deterioration in the crops IN your
fields, your gardens and your orchards?
The honey that the bee makes is en-
tirely side issue and l am not con-
sidering it, l doubt, in fact, whether
honey should be extracted from bee
hives. Honey making with the bee
was not a quality given him as mat
ter of human economies but 1t was one
which would preserve the bee itself in
the cold winter time when the bee was
alternating and when, too, there were
no flowers out in the fields. / can
assert that no student of bee life or
no student of plant breeding on good
second thought would ever apply mo-
lasses wholesale out in his fields.
Test Plats.
AS TO the efficiency of molasses /
think my observer above who said
that in his neighborhood while some
used it on three to four leaf cotton
that nobody would dare use it on large
cotton, where from three to five
hundred leaves are involved, and any
man who is using it on big cotton is
running the risk of losing some mighty
good sales of 25-cent cotton. In all of
this molasses propaganda there has
not been one single checked plat test
reported by its adherents. The only
check plat test I ever read Of mo-
lasseS was one quoted by me the other
day where under heavy infestation
dusting had reduced infestation to
seven per cent while the mOlasses
method as practiced in Il neighboring
field carried 45 per cent. infestation.
Knowing all of the facts above about