Excerpt from Nature's Garden: An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and Their Insect Visitors Because bees depend absolutely upon flowers, not only for their own food but for that of future generations for whom they labor; because they are the most diligent of all visitors, and are rarely diverted from one species of flower to another while on their rounds collecting, as they must, both nectar and pollen, it fol lows they are the most important fertilizing agents. It is estimated that, should they perish, more than half the flowers in the world would be exterminated with them! Australian farmers imported clover from Europe, and although they had luxuriant fields of it, no seed was set for next year's planting, because they had failed to import the bumblebee. After his arrival, their loss was speedily made good. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.