Presently a big muscular bumblebee booms along. Owing to
his great strength, an inverted, pendent blossom, from which he
must cling upside down, has no more terrors for him than a
trapeze for the trained acrobat. His long tongue—if he is one of
the largest of our sixty-two species of Bombus—can suck almost
any flower unless it 1s epee adapted to night-flying sphinx
moths, but can he drain this? He is the truest benefactor of the
European columbine (A. vulgaris, see p. 15), whose spurs sug-
gested the talons of an eagle (aquda) to imaginative Linnaeus
when he gave this group of plants its generic name. Smaller
bumblebees, unable through the shortness of their tongues to
feast in a legitimate manner, may be detected nipping holes in the
tips of all columbines, where the nectar is secreted, just as they do
in larkspurs, Dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, butter and eggs,
and other flowers whose deeply hidden nectaries make dining too
difficult for the little rogues. Fragile butterflies, absolutely de-
pendent on nectar, hover near our showy wild columbine with
its five tempting horns of plenty, but sail away again, knowing
as they do that their weak legs are not calculated to stand the
strain of an inverted position from a pendent flower, nor are their
tongues adapted to slender tubes unless these may be entered from
above. The tongues of both butterflies and moths bend readily
only when directed beneath their bodies. It will be noticed that
our columbine’s funnel-shaped tubes contract just below the point
where the nectar is secreted—doubtless to protect it from small
bees. When we see the honey-bee or the little wild bees—Halictus
aa the flower, we may know they get pollen only.
