Show Out of Doors in the West Sketches of Natural History in the Rocky Mountain Plateau Edited by J. H. of Nature Study In the of Utah The Western Bee Flower Most of the boys and and many of the in the Rocky Mountain know a green plant with red purplish vulgarly called the stink-weed or But it has a better and its use is not simply to annoy the people with its strong and rather unpleasant In it does not give off this odor unless its foliage is handled or slightly unlike some it minds its own But from its crushed loaves a strange to- most a very disagreeable odor arises an odor that has given to this plant its ugly The true name of this really fine weed is Cleome pronounced in three with accent on the A pretty don't you and good enough to be made the poetic title of the heroine in a French I suspect that name is of Grecian it is a good and the plant is worthy of this artistic For Cleome is the bee plant of the so named from the service which it renders to the insect honey gatherers and it is as necessary to the pretty humming birds as it is to the useful Now Blooming in the The Rocky Mountain bee plant is found only throughout the western and seems to be much more abundant southward than in the more northerly parts of the- vast region of which we try to learn something It is much by the to know something real about the plants of our own locality than to read or be told of something we cannot see in some distant land or foreign If any of the boys and girls have never seen the bee they may find it in the lower parts of the chiefly about the edges of plowed may recognize it by its bunches of reddish purple flowers sometimes golden yellow at the ends of branches on a j. t dark green with stems almost as strong and coarse as those of a It is less common now in the fields than it was a few years and I did not secure a good specimen for the grade pupils to draw so that we at no picture of it from the handy pencils of Stevens' classes at the State But as the plant is so well known here I trust that the omission of the drawing for the present will not seriously detract from our study of this unique and common species of our Preserved from We learned in a former chapter how the sunflower attracts its repels its and protects its How does the bee preserve itself from It is a near relative of the mustard nearly all of which are relished as food by sheep and But Cleome has a distinct duty to it must feed the bees and the humming perhaps western America would not possess half a score of different kinds of these tiny bird while the east has one and the bees and of the semi-arid region might perish or go hungry in the fall from lack of enough honey-bearing All the that the bee plant can provide is made to go into its leaving its foliage without much while its thus drained of its is not merely tasteless but biting and For nature more than simply to concentrate the sweetness in the by some strange chemical the sap is not left merely insipid and but is turned into a acrid that makes the cattle leave the bee plant severely These fall bloomers seem to have been intended for the the the moth and the humming No Bugs on nature did not pro Cleome with bitter gum like sunflower to keep off the stoc or with an to prote the massed or with row and prickly stems that wo keep out the crawling but the bee though of with delicate and attractive is as wl protected from destruction ft natural enemies as is the flower with all its bristling and turret walls of For the beetles that devour tation hate the taste of soft leaves of are repelled at the first from the strong-scented cows and sheep turn up noses and walk away showy but pungent and and even the plant found swarming on almost thing else in the way of vegi I have never seen the branches of the bee pir Please notice those that you in your neighborhood and n the writer if this ment is too Can you j m any bugs on you but I think not rag and not Because offe freedom from insect thet plant might be a for flower A Gypsy mil And nature has the a it must seem to for shelta taken a plant so near to tards that at first I took it a real but strange member great edible or food has turned it into a nauseous fl that nothing will At time she has reared it and has it such masses of fairly of purple and gl colors that it can be seen- afar across our deserts keen eyes of the humming bj and cannot be missed by dering Its flower fairly gleam with their colors and sparkling project far beyond the corTi and are capped with sparkle like tiny jewels That the herb provide a good medicine of nish some acid for use in and we can doubt and only our character and properties prevented us from or making some use of the of the fall more southerly she with a crown ot tall saving for delights of beholding our of many-hued And we knew when we know the it we can of its repellent iMe and fancy that it is mere and possibly be wiser generations than a fly poison and insect said Cleome is of and that it only in the lowlands of the Purple and gold are royal and we may call this a. sort of gypsy queen wild beauty a of nature as cool and dis- 0 as she is our she performing for us the real splendid service of making waste places beautiful with of color and lively with of the whirr and of humming and all even affording food for multiplication of Pies of insect IE Details and find Cleome blooming agh August and I g purple It is called also the bee because it is frequented by any wasp-like insects that J as stated Son account of the k odor of its- foliage t jn the children dislike fits flowers have little re-very They stand I e of the-Jong in i f ed bunches of a H i T Pupil's each flower is if an Oc- 1 the flowers of J shining but no either all j and this splendid aP ii j it often grows about three III but not rarely five six Its coarse stems are commonly tinged with reddish It has four in the orm of a and much larger than the four green There are six the filaments' of which usually project beyond the is the term They are of about equal unlike the flowers of the cross-shaped on four of the stamens are long and two are The seed pod is many with two rows of seeds not two-celled as in the These are all branching annual with flowers in racemes and pods pendant on spreading They belong to-the caper family to the genus Summary of The book names only three of which two are common They are Cleome lutea aurea of Nuttall most people think the better on account of the golden and C. Aurea or lutea is the yellow and the purple flowered the aurea is one to two feet with five is said by the books to be two to three feet but is four to five and I it over six feet in The capers of commerce are the dried flower buds of another they are used in we may say merely that the lower valleys of the Rocky especially t thosa grows large weed with purple that appear in the late summer anil early Its' leaves' have a. disagreeable and the children the But if stop we shall be like the Peter whom poet the following primrose on the river A was him The Fact and the fact i something-more the the the best-of of fact gives-zest value to any observation when we merely note that bees like these have half a dozen on one plant at the same that the butterflies favor that the Monarch is frequently seen-upon the purple that the humming birds delight to visit these showy bouquets have seen literally scores of the ailed hummers hovering about a single patch of all this may be noted indifferently by some yet a a mere exclamation of wonder or delight at some phase of these phenomena may such a source of inspiration to younger pupils as to form the beginning of such interest and zeal in the observation of nature as produces Is it not worth |