he middle of the general basin, at the head of a
long system of cascades from ten to 200 feet high, one following the
other in close succession down a rocky, inaccessible canon, making a
total descent of nearly 1700 feet. Above the cascades the main stream
passes through a series of open, sunny levels, the largest of which are
about an acre in size, where the wild bees and their companions were
feasting on a showy growth of zauschneria, painted cups, and monardella;
and gray squirrels were busy harvesting the burs of the Douglas Spruce,
the only conifer I met in the basin.

The eastern slopes of the basin are in every way similar to those we
have described, and the same may be said of other portions of the range.
From the highest summit, far as the eye could reach, the landscape was
one vast bee-pasture, a rolling wilderness of honey-bloom, scarcely
broken by bits of forest or the rocky outcrops of hilltops and ridges.

Behind the San Bernardino Range lies the wild "sage-brush country,"
bounded on the east by the Colorado River, and extending in a general
northerly direction to Nevada and along the eastern base of the Sierra
beyond Mono Lake.

The greater portion of this immense region, including Owen's Valley,
Death Valley, and the Sink of the Mohave, the area of which is nearly
one fifth that of the entire State, is usually regarded as a desert, not
because of any lack in the soil, but for want of rain, and rivers
available for irrigation. Very little of it, however, is desert in the
eyes of a bee.

Looking now over all the available pastures of California, it appears
that the business of beekeeping is still in its infancy. Even in the
more enterprising of the southern counties, where so vigorous a
beginning has been made, less than a tenth of their honey resources have
as yet been developed; while in the Great Plain, the Coast Ranges, the
Sierra Nevada, and the northern region about Mount Shasta, the business
can hardly be said to exist at all. What the limits of its developments
in the future may be, with the advantages of cheaper transportation and
the invention of better methods in general, it is not easy to guess.
Nor, on the other hand, are we able to measure the influence on bee
interests likely to follow the destruction of the forests, now rapidly
falling before fire and the ax. As to the sheep evil, that can hardly
become greater than it is at the present day. In short, notwithstanding
the wide-spread det