Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

Of course other insects with similar tongues can get the honey too, and a good many, whose tongues are quite different, can reach more or less of it; but the bulk of the honey is for the favorite visitor. He can reach clear to the bottom of the nectary, and in some cases, where the favorite insect has a very long and very slender tongue, the spur, or tube, will be so long and slender that none but that particular kind of insect can get the honey at all.

Everybody who lives in New England, and a good many who do not, knows the white azalea, often called swamp honeysuckle.

Swamp honeysuckle and the large night-flying moths are great friends. The azalea has provided honey for the fellows, and protects it, too, against other visitors, all but the bees and humming birds. The humming birds are welcome, and the bees have a way of coming whether they are welcome or not.

If you go just at dark to where the azaleas are blooming, you will not see the moths, but you will hear them. The chief sounds in the woods are the rustling of twigs and leaves in the breeze, the calling of frogs from the ponds, the noises of the insects, and the voices of the night-flying birds. Then all at once there comes another sound,—a steady buzz-z-z that draws nearer and nearer until it seems to be close to your ear. This is the moth come to visit the honeysuckle. And, no doubt, the honeysuckle is glad to feel the breeze of these fanning wings and feel the long tongue enter the tube, for the moth’s body touches the out-reaching stigma and leaves there pollen from some other flower whose honey it has enjoyed. From the stamens it detaches pollen grains to carry to another flower; and this, too, no doubt, gives happiness to the azalea, for it makes its pollen, not for its own use, but for the sake of its azalea friends.

You see, the azalea has long, upturned filaments that reach far out of the tube, and the style is yet longer, so that only a large insect or a humming bird, collecting honey while on the wing, can really give pollen to the stigma.

Bees alight back of the anthers and take the honey. If they want pollen they collect it from the stamens without touching the stigma, except once in a while by accident, as it were. So however much the majority of flowers may love and respect the bee, our azalea has no liking for her. Besides, the bee has a bad habit of biting a hole in the flower tube and getting the honey that way. This would be a thoroughly disreputable performance on the part of any insect, and if bees are not ashamed of it they ought to be.

The azalea does several things for the moth it loves. It may be its beautiful white color is for his sake; anyway, if the flower were not white the moth would not be likely to find it, since he flies abroad after the birds have gone to rest,—that is, in the evening, when it is dark in the damp thickets where the honeysuckle loves to grow. Azalea has a sweet white corolla with a long, slender tube containing nectar that moth or humming bird can reach, but which bees cannot reach. Watch a bee try some time. If the flower is between you and the light, you can see the bee’s brown tongue through the flower tube; she appears to be standing on her toes and reaching in as far as she can; she darts out her tongue to its full length, and you can see it wriggling and straining to get to the abundant honey low down in the flower tube. But there is no use trying; the tongue is too short and the tube too long. The honeysuckle tube was not made to fit the bee’s tongue, and the bee can get only the outer rim of the honey. Perhaps this is why the bee so often breaks in the back way.

Besides being white, the azalea flowers grow in clusters, which makes them yet more visible in the dusk. They exhale a delicious and far-reaching perfume too, and this is a note of invitation to the moths.