Why Do Flowers Have Smells?
Where the bees do this it is because the bee has been visiting the flowers in his search for honey. They do not fly from flower to flower for the purpose of uniting the mother and father natures of plants, but they help the flowers incidentally while getting the honey for which they are searching. In gathering his honey the busy bee will go all over the father flower and get his legs all covered with pollen powder. Sooner or later he comes to a mother flower of the same kind of plant or tree from which he has father pollen on his legs, and, still bent on gathering honey, he incidentally rubs the pollen powder on to the ovary of the mother flower and the fertilization takes place. The wonderful thing about this is that the father pollen of one kind of a plant will not fertilize the mother nature of another kind of plant. To illustrate this, if a bee carrying pollen on his legs from a walnut blossom visits the mother blossom of a hickory tree the pollen of the walnut would not affect the hickory blossom, but would still have the proper effect on the first walnut mother blossom he visited.
This is how life in general is reproduced among the plants and trees. Life in the vegetable kingdom has no sense of feeling or any of the other senses, but this kind of life is still true to its own nature and is a wise thing in the plan of creation, because, since all seed will produce only plants like those from which the seed came, man can control the growth of the vegetables and fruits he needs as food. He knows when he plants corn that he will get corn in return, because perfect seed never makes a mistake. It would mix things up terribly for man if this were not so, because man might then plant one thing and find another thing growing. It would be a sad thing to plant wheat and find thistles growing.
In order that seeds may grow they must be planted under conditions that suit the kind of vegetable life in the seed. Man has to study and learn what these conditions are.
If a seed is planted too deeply the sun may not have a chance to warm the ground to that depth, and if it is planted too near the surface it may become too warm and be killed by the sun. When planted under the proper conditions the seed soon begins to grow. It grows upward toward the sun to get light and air, and it sends roots down into the ground to get food and moisture.
The life in the vegetable kingdom is soon able to take care of itself.