seed production. In a dry season, such as the season of 1916, the honeybee prefers alsike-clover even to white-clover. Alsike-clover prefers moist soil conditions, and during dry periods will yield nectar when white-clover will not.
A few figures illustrating the cross-pollination possibilities among the honeybee may not be out of place.
A good average colony of honeybees at the time of the blooming of alsike-clover would number something like 50,000 worker bees. Sane colonies would contain less, and some more, but this number may be considered a good average colony. It will be assumed that 30,000 of these worker bees are field bees.
The number of flowers that a single bee visits in securing a load of nectar, or that it may visit during one entire day is of course very changeable. The figures given herewith are, however, considered very conservative. If a worker bee visits 20 flowers in order to secure a load of nectar, and it should make 10 trips daring the day while nectar is being secreted, it would visit 200 flowers of alsike-clover in one day. Using this number, a colony of honeybees, containing 30,000 field bees, would visit something like 6,000,000 flowers in one day. Suppose that owing to adverse weather conditions the bees were only able to work on alsike-clover for 5 days, one colony would still be able to visit something like 30,000,000 flowers in 5 days. Taking 100 colonies as an average sized apiary, and using the same average figures, something like 3,000,000,000 flowers would be visited during the 5 days that the bees were able to work. The number blooming days for alsike-clover is, however, usually much greater than this, also an entire field does not bloom all at once, but a profusion of flowers is available to the bees to work on for ten days to two weeks and sometimes more. Also, all fields of alsike-clover in the vicinity of an apiary do not usually