It would
take up too much space to show the various steps, through dimorphism and
other means, by which the separation of the sexes in plants of various
kinds is apparently now in progress; but I may add that some of the species
of holly in North America are, according to Asa Gray, in an exactly
intermediate condition, or, as he expresses it, are more or less
dioeciously polygamous.
Let us now turn to the nectar-feeding insects; we may suppose the plant of
which we have been slowly increasing the nectar by continued selection, to
be a common plant; and that certain insects depended in main part on its
nectar for food. I could give many facts showing how anxious bees are to
save time: for instance, their habit of cutting holes and sucking the
nectar at the bases of certain flowers, which with a very little more
trouble they can enter by the mouth. Bearing such facts in mind, it may be
believed that under certain circumstances individual differences in the
curvature or length of the proboscis, etc., too slight to be appreciated by
us, might profit a bee or other insect, so that certain individuals would
be able to obtain their food more quickly than others; and thus the
communities to which they belonged would flourish and throw off many swarms
inheriting the same peculiarities. The tubes of the corolla of the common
red or incarnate clovers (Trifolium pratense and incarnatum) do not on a
hasty glance appear to differ in length; yet the hive-bee can easily suck
the nectar out of the incarnate clover, but not out of the common red
clover, which is visited by humble-bees alone; so that whole fields of the
red clover offer in vain an abundant supply of precious nectar to the
hive-bee.
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