“Stamen!” said Elsie.
“Yes, each of these stems is called a stamen, and they form the male part of the plant, the father part. Many plants, those of the simpler kinds, have only one stamen and it grows in the flower so that its head hangs right above the ovary. Here you see that all of the stamens are above the ovary, and the reason why they are placed there by nature you will see very soon. What I wish now is to show you why the bee came to the flower.”
“I know—it was for honey! Isn’t that what you said before, mamma?”
“Yes, darling, but do you see any honey here?” 29
“No, mamma, and I never knew before that buttercups had honey. I always thought honey came from a beehive.”
“It does come to us from a beehive, but it comes from flowers first, and one of the many kinds that furnish it is this buttercup. The bee sips it from the flowers, just a tiny bit from each blossom that he visits, and when he has enough he takes it home to the hive and puts it away to eat by-and-by, in the winter, when there are no flowers growing for him to rifle. He does it just as men lay away money for ‘a rainy day,’ as we say, and as squirrels lay up a store of nuts for the cold weather. Now, suppose you count those flattened, round-cornered parts of the buttercup—how many are there?”
“Five,” said Elsie quickly. 30
“Yes, there are five of them, and they are called petals. You will notice that they are much narrower and slighter at the bottom than they are at the top. It is at the bottom that they are joined to the central part of the flower. Now, just where they are connected with this central part there is a tiny sack of honey.”
“It must be very tiny,” said Elsie, regarding the slender connection earnestly, “for there isn’t room enough for much, I’m sure. And it must be all covered up, for I can’t see any signs of it.”
“It is covered up. There is a very small scale, or leaf, over it to protect it from those insects who have no right to the honey. But the bee knows how to get at it, and he does so very quickly, once he alights on the blossom, as we 31 have just seen one do. For while he appeared as if he were merely tumbling clumsily around on the flower he was sampling those honey-sacks, and we saw how speedily he finished all five of them on this flower and then buzzed busily away to the other.”