6 MAY 1949, Page 20

Too Many Bees We all desire that the bees shall

fertilise our fruit blossom, but an aesthetic gardener may suffer from an excess of bees. As soon as a blossom is fertilised it begins to break up. It is almost ludicrous, for example, to see on a head of clover one floret standing up pink and live while the others have flopped into brownness. They had been fertilised-and the other not. On a particular pear tree I noticed this year hoW rapidly the petals fell from the fertilised blossoms. This happens, I imagine, in most flowers. One very lovely garden known in me is half ruined in its owner's opinion by the inordinate number of bees that have frequented it since a bee-farm came into being in an adjacent field. Now almost all the flowers have a shorter life than is expected of them.