Nature Study Lesson 167: The White Clover

I invited the boys to find clover in the backyard and to bring some inside to sketch. They found White Clover. 

"The white clover has creeping stems. Its flowers depend upon the bees for their pollination and the bees depend upon the white clover blossoms for honey." Handbook of Nature Study, p.597

The middle son said that he had noticed that the bees were swarming the clover yesterday but not so much today. We had learned last year when we studied bees that bees choose a different flower each day to get the nectar from. Yesterday must have been white clover day.  Looking at the clover closely, they noticed that the flower is made up of many small flowers, each with their own calyx.  They also noticed that the flowers are not all just white. The leaves, too, are not just a single green, but several shades and some even had hues of red in them.