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As you nibble candy and feel pleased with the taste of it, do you sometimes wonder where all the sugar in the world comes from?
Some of it comes from beet plants. The pretty, red, tender beets we eat at the table have sugar in them, as we can tell by the sweet taste. But these red beets are not the kind that people grow for sugar. Sugar beets are larger and they have pale roots.
Once upon a time, about one hundred years ago, there were no fields of sugar beets growing in the United States. There were not even any seeds of sugar beets here. Then people began to bring the seeds across the ocean from France and other places where these plants grew.
At one time or another during the hundred years since the seeds were brought here for the first time, people have tried growing sugar beets in Michigan and in California and in many states between. In some of these places there are now great fields of sugar beets every year, but in some places the people would rather grow other crops. Perhaps you know whether you live in a sugar-beet state.
A beet plant puts most of its sugar into its root; so the root is the part that is sent to the factory. Sheep and cattle like to eat beet leaves, and the men who have beet fields often keep these animals so that the leaves will not be wasted. Sheep and cattle also like to eat the pulp that is left from the root after the sugar is taken out. Sometimes this pulp is given to cattle wet, just as it comes from the factory. Sometimes it is dried into a kind of beet hay. Sometimes it is kept in a silo and not used until winter.
There are many sugar-beet factories in the United States now, but there was a time when there was not one in this country or in any other country either. The French people were the first who made much sugar from beets. That was in the days when a man named Napoleon was living in France. Napoleon started some schools where people learned about sugar beets; and he told the French farmers to plant beets so that they could have that kind of sugar at home instead of needing to buy cane sugar from other countries.
Cane sugar is the kind that people in the United States used before beet sugar could be had here. Now we use both kinds.
The sugar cane is a plant that grows tall and straight, something like a giant corn stalk. (Cane is a word that is sometimes used instead of stalk. ) There is sugar in a corn plant, too, as you can tell by cutting the stalk and sucking it. And there is so much sugar in some corn seeds that we call them "sweet corn" and like to nibble them from the cob when they are cooked. But there is a great deal more sugar in the sugar cane. This plant will not grow so far north as the sugar beet will, but in the south there are cane fields so big that men have built railroads through them. When the cane is cut, it is put into the cars that are waiting on the tracks and taken at once to the mills where the juice is pressed out. There are such fields in Louisiana, where more sugar cane is grown than in any other state.
When men plant sugar cane, they do not use seeds as they do when they plant beets. They cut the stalks into pieces and put these pieces into the ground. There are buds at the places in the stalks near where the leaves drop off, and after the pieces of stalk have been in the ground for a while these buds sprout and grow up into new sugar-cane plants.
Perhaps some day you will ask your teacher to tell you about the hard times the people in Louisiana had trying to grow other crops before they began to grow sugar cane. For though sugar cane has been grown in this country a great many years longer than sugar beets, there was a time when not even sugar cane grew here.
If you never saw a field of sugar cane, perhaps you have seen a field of sorgo. (This word is also written sorghum. ) Sorgo is grown in forty-eight states, so you would not need to travel many miles to see how it looks. It belongs in the same family of plants as sugar cane and corn. The juice is pressed out as the juice of sugar cane is. This juice is not made into sugar, but is sold as syrup.
Once there was no sorgo in this country either. No sugar beet! No sugar cane! No sorgo! What did the people do then, when they wanted something sweet to eat?
In those days they used maple sugar. When the white men first came to America, the Indians sold them sugar made from maple trees. Then the white men learned how to make it for themselves, and they have been making it every year since. Holes are cut through the bark of the trees in the spring before the leaves grow, when the sap runs fast. Some of the sap runs out of these holes and is caught in pails. It is then poured into big kettles and boiled, getting thicker and thicker all the time until first it is syrup and then, if it is boiled a much longer time, it is sugar.
Boys and girls who visit sugar camps in Vermont or other places like to see the sugar maples because they are large and handsome trees. There is something else they like to see and like to smell and like to taste. They like to see the sap running through the holes in the bark into the pails, and they are surprised to find how much comes out through one hole. They like to drink some of the sap just as it comes from the tree to see how sweet it is before it has been boiled at all. Some of them think that the very best candy in the world is the kind that can be made by pouring thick, hot maple syrup into some snow that is packed hard in a pan. This candy is called maple wax. Of course you do not have to visit a sugar camp to eat maple wax. Anybody who lives where there is clean snow can make this kind of candy, if he can get a little maple syrup to boil.
Maple sugar used to be the only kind of sugar that was sold in stores in America. But now the kinds made from cane and beet plants are what we commonly buy, and some people have never tasted maple sugar.
The beet plant stores its sugar in its root, the sugar cane and sorgo keep their syrup in their stalks, and the maple tree has sweet sap under its bark; but many plants put their very sweetest juices into their flowers. This sweet liquid is called nectar.
It is from flower-cups with nectar in them that the honeybees sip. Honeybees made honey for themselves long before men learned how to get sugar or syrup from plants. When men found how good honey is to eat, they began to take it away from the bees. At first bees lived in hollow trees and in caves, and it was not easy for men to scoop the honey out from such places. The bees were angry when disturbed and robbed, and they fought the men.
A bee fights by using her sting. The bee's sting is like a fine, sharp needle. If she is not touched or frightened, she keeps it hidden at the tip of her body; but she can push it out very quickly when she needs to protect herself or her home.
After a while men thought of a way to get honey without frightening the bees. They made boxes which the bees could use, instead of caves or hollows in trees, for homes. Such boxes are called beehives. Nowadays men make hives in such a way that they can open them at the top and take out honey without being stung. Of course they must not take out all the honey, because the bees need some for themselves.
Indeed so many hundreds of bees live together in one hive that they need a great deal of honey to use for food. That is why they are so very busy all summer taking nectar from flowers and making it into honey. The bees that do this and the other work about the hives are called workers.
A bee has a long tongue and she can poke the tip of it into a flower-cup far enough to reach the nectar at the bottom. She draws up the sweet liquid into her mouth, and from there it passes into a place inside her body that is sometimes called a honey sac, where it is changed into thin honey. After a worker has come home to her hive, she puts the thin honey from her honey sac into a waxen cell in the honeycomb, where it stays open to the air until it "ripens." When honey is ripe, it is thicker than when it is first put into the cell.
There are, as I have said, many hundreds of bees living together in one hive and most of them are workers. When wax is needed for the cells of the honeycomb, some of the workers make it. First they eat as much honey as they can swallow and then they hang themselves up in the hive in a sort of bee curtain. To do this each bee reaches up with her front feet and catches hold of the hind feet of the bee above her. After a while the wax forms in little flakes in some wax pockets which are on the under side of the bees' bodies. The workers chew this wax until it is soft and then make cells of the honeycombs with it. They use their jaws as tools when they are building the cells. The cells have six sides like little six-sided boxes, and, when the honey in them has ripened, the bees close the ends by covering them over with waxen caps.
You must not think that all the cells in a beehive are filled with honey. Many of them have baby bees in them. Such cells are called brood cells. Baby bees do not look like grown bees. They are fat, white, wingless, footless little things; and each one stays in its own cell. These baby bees are tended by some of the workers, which draw up partly digested food from their own stomachs and give it to the young ones.
Bees do not eat honey alone. They need pollen, too. Pollen is the yellow or brown "dust" that is in flowers. Worker bees gather pollen by poking it into the little hollow pollen baskets on their hind legs. Each worker has two of them, one on each hind leg. After the bees have brought the pollen to the hive they take it out of their baskets and pack it into cells. It is then called beebread. The workers eat honey and beebread for their own food and share what they eat with the baby bees.
When a baby bee is large enough to fill a cell, it is time for it to change into a grown-up brown bee with wings and legs. Such a change as this cannot be made suddenly. So the cell with the baby in it is closed over; and the young one takes a sort of nap, during which something wonderful happens in its body. When it wakens, it is a grown bee like the others in the hive; so it comes out of its cell and lives the same sort of life the other grown bees do.
There is room in this chapter to tell only a few of the things that are done by honeybees. Because so many things happen in a hive, honey is, perhaps, the most interesting sweet food we have.
The tongues of honeybees are shaped for licking and sipping, and no harm comes to plants from the visits of these insects. There are some much smaller insects, however, called aphids, that punch holes in plants with their beaks. Through these holes they stick their long, slender mouthparts and drink as much plant juice as they need. You may not have heard as much about aphids as you have about honeybees; but there are a great many more of them in the world. There are so many kinds of aphids, indeed, that I think you cannot be among plants very much without seeing some of them.
The smallest kinds of aphids are so little that it would take more than twenty of them going single file to make a procession an inch long. Twenty aphids of the largest kinds would make a procession about four inches long. You can take a ruler and make marks on a paper to show how long a small kind of aphid is and how long a large kind is.
You will probably be able to find some of these insects if you watch. It does not matter very much where you are when you look, for there may be aphids on the trees and bushes and other plants in a city park as well as in country places. Nearly every kind of plant that you can think of, beets and sugar cane and maple trees and roses and lilies and ferns and evergreen trees and all the rest, sometimes have aphids on them.
Many kinds of aphids are green. Some other kinds are brown or gray or pink or black or white. Whatever color they are, they are thirsty from the very first day of their lives. They can feed themselves even when they are very young. They do not need to have the older aphids feed them. Some kinds feed on the underground parts of plants. More kinds, however, spend their time on the stems or leaves or on the blossom clusters. Wherever they stay, they stick in their sharp little beaks and drink plant juice even more steadily than bees sip nectar.
Aphids suck up a great deal of juice. Some of it is used by these insects to make them grow; and some of it is passed through their bodies in clear, colorless, sweet drops. These sweet drops fall on the leaves and on the ground, and people call them honeydew.
Just as honey is sweeter after it has been in the honey sac of the bee than it was when it was gathered from the flower as nectar, so honeydew is sweeter than the plant juice the aphids sip. It is a favorite drink with sweet-loving insects. Wasps come and lap it up from the leaves. Honeybees sometimes take it and mix it with their honey. And ants like it best of all.
Indeed, ants are so very fond of honeydew that they do not wait for it to be spattered around on the leaves. They creep up among the aphids and drink from the aphids' bodies. Aphids are used to this and when an ant comes up behind an aphid and touches it with its feelers, the aphid lets out a drop gently from the tip of its body. The ant laps it up before it falls. Many people have watched ants feeding among a flock of aphids; and they think it is so funny that they laugh and call the aphids the "ants' cows" and say that the ants are milking their herd. Sometimes ants build a little shed over a colony of aphids on the stem of a plant. For this they use something that looks like sawdust stuck together. Sometimes ants carry their little "cows" in their mouths to fresh plants where there is a better chance to feed.
Just as maple sap changes to sugar when most of the water is boiled off in steam, and just as honey turns sugary when it is left where it dries in the sun and air, so the honeydew syrup becomes sugar when it dries.
Once I saw a whole hillside crusted over with honeydew sugar like a giant cake with sugar frosting. The sugar made a crunching sound under my shoes as I walked up the hill. There were very many evergreen trees on the hill and almost every twig was covered with aphids. The honeydew had been falling like raindrops for days, and it had dried into sugar in the sun. Indians used to gather honeydew sugar when they found a lot of it, and they ate it with their food. It has a pleasant taste.
The fact that aphids can make honeydew from so many plants shows that there is sugar in a great many more plants than beets and cane and sorgo and maple trees. Indeed, there is sugar in every growing plant that has green leaves. You do not need to visit Colorado or Louisiana or Vermont to see a sugar-making plant. You do not even need to go into the country. It is rather fun, don't you think, to know that there is sugar in grass in the park, and sugar in all the trees and bushes there? There is sugar in the growing plants in the shop window and in those at home or in the schoolroom. If you wanted to, you could put a bean or any other seed in some earth; and as soon as it grew big enough to have leaves it would begin to make sugar.
The green stuff in the leaf is what makes the sugar. It makes sugar all day while the sun shines. In the sunlight the green stuff in plants can make sugar. It cannot do this in the dark. So every plant is a sugar factory running by sunlight.
You may guess that plants would not go to all this work of making sugar all day long unless this is very important to the plant. So it is. Indeed, sugar, changed in one way or another, is the chief food the plant needs for its growth. Every plant in the world needs it.
I know a guessing game about food that it is fun to play. The most interesting thing about this game is that if you guess back far enough you always find a green plant. It does not make one bit of difference where you start. You may begin with honey and get back to the bee and then to the flower of a green plant. You may begin with an egg and get back to the hen and then to the cracked corn the hen eats, which is the seed of a green plant. You may begin with milk and get back to the cow and then to the hay the cow eats, which is the leaves and stems of green plants. You may play this game for a day or a year; but you can never think of any real food you eat that does not lead you back to the flower or the fruit or the seed or the leaf or the stem or the root or some part of a plant that has green color.
The same thing happens if you play this guessing game about the food of any other animal besides yourself. Sometimes the hunt will be a crooked one with many turns in it; but if you do not lose your way, you will come to the green plant at last.
This is because it is only plants with green color in
them that can make
So when you nibble candy and feel pleased with the taste of it, there are many things for you to think about. It is interesting to know why sugar is so very, very important. It is because sugar, changed in different ways, is a food that all plants must have to keep them alive. And if there were no plants, whatever would we and all the other animals eat?