better soil, or more room to grow in, or more sunshine or, something that makes them better than their brothers and sisters. So they have a chance to make better seeds. The weak plants die more easily. This is nature's way of picking out the best.
Among the flowers there were some born with deeper little pockets, so the insects could not get at the honey without covering themselves with pollen. So these flowers kept more of their honey for their own use, and made the bees and butterflies scatter their pollen. The kind of flowers that spread their honey, or that had pockets that were easily "picked," died. The flowers that have the stronger perfume have a better chance, too, and those that have attractive colors.
Suppose a bee goes after honey in an apple blossom. It likes the color and the smell. So it goes to another apple blossom and another. It doesn't visit anything but apple blossoms until it goes back to the hive. Just why it does this we do not know, but very likely bees and butterflies are much like little boys and girls. When they get a taste of anything good, they like to make a meal of it. Once a little girl was asked why she didn't eat bread with her jelly. She thought a moment and then said, soberly:
"The delly is dooder."
Maybe that is all the answer the bee could make. For the time it has the color and smell and taste of apple blossoms, and that seems "dooder." The next time it comes it may blunder into a head of clover. Then nothing but clover will satisfy it. In this way insects are kept from mixing the pollens of different plants. The traps and tricks that flowers have learned, to make the insects scatter their pollen, is interesting. Some have hair nets over the honey cups to hold the little visitor until, in his struggles, he rubs the pollen from his legs, onto the little wet buttons on the seed tube. Then they give him a little honey and let him fly away.
You didn't know, perhaps, that some flowers are so much better than others of the same kind that they really are a little different. You know it is like that in human families. Lincoln was better than and different from all his own people and his neighbors. So was the poet Shakspere, and the poet Burns, and Daniel Webster and Washington. Men who have studied plants find some with a genius for going up higher.
One day a man like this was walking in a field of yellow poppies, in California. Yellow poppies grow wild there. There were acres and
