Flowering Season - July-October.
Distribution - Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico, and westward to
the Mississippi.

This last orchid of the season, and perhaps the commonest of its
interesting tribe in the eastern United States, at least, bears
flowers that, however insignificant in size, are marvelous pieces
of mechanism, to which such men as Charles Darwin and Asa Gray
have devoted hours of study and, these two men particularly, much
correspondence.

Just as a woodpecker begins at the bottom of a tree and taps his
way upward, so a bee begins at the lower and older flowers on a
spike and works up to the younger ones; a fact on which this
little orchid, like many another plant that arranges its b1ossoms
in long racemes, depends. Let us not note for the present what
happens in the older flowers, but begin our observations, with
the help of a powerful lens, when the bee has alighted on the
spreading lip of a newly opened blossom toward the top of the
spire. As nectar is already secreted for her in its receptacle,
she thrusts her tongue through the channel provided to guide it
aright, and by the slight contact with the furrowed rostellum, it
splits, and releases a boat-shaped disk standing vertically on
its stern in the passage. Within the boat is an extremely sticky
cement that hardens almost instantly on exposure to the air. The
splitting of the rostellum, curiously enough, never happens
without insect aid; but if a bristle or needle be passed over it
ever so lightly, a stream of sticky, milky fluid exudes, hardens,
and the boat-shaped disk, with pollen masses attached, may be
withdrawn on the bristle just as the bee removes them with her