growing. Many colonies produced 400 pounds or more of honey each. The honey, like that of the biennial variety, is light amber and has a pleasant aromatic flavor. A southern beekeeper reports that the honey does not differ in color, flavor, or body from that of biennial sweet clover. It granulates readily. Blended with another honey, as that of tupelo, the taste is improved. But a northern beekeeper describes its color as white to light amber without the greenish tinge observed in the honey from the biennial form, and the flavor as resembling that of white clover honey.

Before planting, the seed should be scarified. In an experimental test before scarifying only about 34 per cent, of the seed germinated; but after scarifying, 91 per cent. Nearly every seed company in the United States and many individual seed growers and farmers are now using the Ames hulling and scarifying machine, perfected and given to the world by the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station. The soil should also contain an abundance of lime and the proper sweet clover bacteria. If the soil is acid and the bacteria are absent, the plants will probably not grow more than a foot tall. It is of the greatest importance, therefore, in fields where such conditions prevail, that lime should be worked into the surface, and the soil inoculated with soil gathered from an alfalfa or sweet clover field.

SWEET FENNEL (Foeniculum vulgare). — Cultivated in Europe for its sweet aromatic foliage. Escaped from cultivation, it grows wild in waste places from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. The large umbels of yellow flowers have been reported to yield a light amber honey in California. They appear, however, to be more attractive to wasps than to honeybees.

SWEET PEPPERBUSH. — See Clethra.

TARWEED (Hemizonia). — A genus of annuals, with viscid, unpleasantly scented foliage and yellow or white flowers, belonging to the Compositae. Yellow tarweed (H. virgata) yields in August for about 20 days a light amber honey of good flavor. It is common on the plains of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. Another species (H. fasciculata) is abundant on the mesas of southern California. The honey is dark amber and ill-scented like the plant, granulating in two or three months after extracting. It is used chiefly for manufacturing purposes. Hay-field tarweed (H. luzulaefolia) is abundant in the hay-fields of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. The lemon-yellow flowers appear in April and May. Coast tarweed (H. corymbosa) is common in the fields of the coast counties of Santa Cruz and Monterey. The yellow flowers bloom in June and July.

TEASEL (Dipsacus Fullonum). — A tall herb with prickly stems and small lilac-colored flowers in oblong heads. The linear bracts or leaves underneath the flower-cluster are spiny-pointed and are used for carding milled woolen cloth. In central New York it was formerly cultivated for this purpose, and, in 1910, 52 farms reported 110 acres of teasel. In 1919, 78 acres were harvested. The flowers are adapted to pollination by bumblebees, the corolla-tubes being more than 12 mm. long, or twice the length of the tongue of the honeybee; but as the tube flares at the mouth a part of the nectar can be reached by honeybees.

In the American Bee Journal (Aug. 18, 1886) the honey gathered from teasel is described by G. M. Doolittle, of Borodino, N. Y., as follows:

“Bees work on teasel all hours of the day, and, no matter how well basswood may yield honey, a few bees will be found on teasel. The honey from teasel is very thin and white — in fact, the whitest honey I ever saw; but it is not of as good flavor as either clover or basswood. This thinness of the nectar, and its coming just when basswood does, is the great drawback to it. Coming as it does with basswood makes it of no great advantage except that it usually lasts six to ten days after basswood is gone.

“As to what proportion of my honey has come from teasel the past fifteen years, I should say about one-tenth, some years more and some years not a single pound. In 1877 I got the largest crop, while from 1878 to 1882 little if any was obtained.”