The cultivated buckwheat, Fagopyrum esculentum, ([Fig, 98]), usually blooms in August, as it is sown the first of July—three pecks per acre is the amount to sow—but by sowing the first of June, it may be made to bloom the middle of July, when there is generally, in most localities, an absence of nectar-secreting flowers. The honey is inferior in color and flavor, though some people prefer this to all other honey. The silver-leaf buckwheat blooms longer, has more numerous flowers, and thus yields more grain than the common variety.
Now, too, come the numerous golden-rods. The species of this genus, Solidago ([Fig, 99]), in the Eastern United States, number nearly two-score, and occupy all kinds of soils, and are at home on upland, prairie and morass. They yield abundantly of rich, golden honey, with flavor that is unsurpassed by any other. Fortunate the apiarist who can boast of a thicket of Solidagoes in his locality.
| Fig. 98.—Buckwheat. | Fig. 99.—Golden-Rod. |
Fig. 100.—Aster.
The many plants usually styled sun-flowers, because of their resemblance to our cultivated plants of that name, which deck the hill-side, meadow and marsh-land, now unfurl their showy involucres, and open their modest corollas, to invite the myriad insects to sip the precious nectar which each of the clustered flowers secretes. Our cultivated sun-flowers, I think, are indifferent honey plants, though some think them big with beauty, and their seeds are relished by poultry. But the asters ([Fig, 100]), so wide-spread, the beggar-ticks, Bidens, and Spanish-needles of our marshes, the tick-seed, Coreopsis, also, of the low, marshy places, with hundreds more of the great family Compositæ, are replete with precious nectar, and with favorable seasons make the apiarist who dwells in their midst jubilant, as he watches the bees, which fairly flood the hives with their rich and delicious honey. In all of this great family, the flowers are small and inconspicuous, clustered in compact heads, and when the plants are showy with bloom, like the sun-flowers, the brilliancy is due to the involucre, or bracts which serve as a frill to decorate the more modest flowers.
I have thus mentioned the most valuable honey plants of our country. Of course there are many omissions. Let all apiarists, by constant observation, help to fill up the list.
BOOK ON BOTANY.
I am often asked what books are best to make apiarists botanists. I am glad to answer this question, as the study of botany will not only be valuable discipline, but will also furnish abundant pleasure, and more, give important practical information. Gray's Lessons, and Manual of Botany, in one volume, published by Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co., New York, is the most desirable treatise on this subject.