All this you may see for yourselves if you find geraniums* in the hedges, and nasturtiums in you garden.  But even if you have not these, you may learn the history of another flower quite as curious, and which you can find in any field or lane even near London.  The common dead-nettle (Fig. 59) takes a great deal of trouble in order that the bee may carry off its pollen.  When you have found one of these plants, take a flower from the ring all round the stalk and tear it gently open, so that you can see down its throat.  There, just at the very bottom, you will find a thick fringe of hairs, and you will guess at once that these are to protect a drop of honey below.  Little insects which would creep into the flower and rob it of its honey without touching the anthers of the stamens cannot get past these hairs, and so the drop is kept till the bee comes to fetch it. (The scarlet and other bright geraniums of our flower-gardens are not true geraniums, but pelargoniums.  You may, however, watch all these peculiarities in them if you cannot procure the true wild geranium.)

Now look for the stamens; there are four of them, two long and two short, and they are quite hidden under the hood which forms the top of the flower.  How will the bee touch them?  If you were to watch one, you would find that when the bee alights on the broad lip and thrusts her head down the tube, she first of all knows her back against the little forked tip.  This is the sticky stigma, and she leaves there any dust she has brought from another flower; then, as she must push far in to reach the honey, before she comes out again has carried away the yellow powder on her back, ready to give it to the next flower.

Do you remember how we noticed at the beginning of the lecture that a bee always likes to visit the same kind of plant in one journey?  You see now that this is very useful to the flowers.  If the bee went from a dead-nettle to a geranium, the dust would be lost, for it would be of no use to any other plant but a dead-nettle.  But since the bee likes to get the same kind of honey each journey, she goes to the same kind of flowers, and places the pollen-dust just where it is wanted.

There is another flower, called the Salvia, which belongs to the same family as our dead-nettle, and I think you will agree with me that its way of dusting the bee’s back is most clever.  The Salvia (Fig. 60) is shaped just like the dead-nettle, with a hood and a broad lip, but instead of four stamens it has only two, the other two being shrivelled up.  The two that are left have a very strange shape, for the stalk or filament of the stamen is very short, while the anther, which is in most flowers two little bags stuck together, has here grown out into a long thread, with a little dust-bag at one end only.  In 1, Fig. 60, you only see one of these stems, because the flower is cut in half, but in the whole flower, one stands on each side just within the lip.  Now, when the bee puts her head into the tube to reach the honey, she passes right between these two swinging anthers, and knocking against the end pushes it before her and so brings the dust-bag plump down on her back, scattering the dust there! you can easily try this by thrusting a pencil into any Salvia flower, and you will see the anther fall.