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.