Many little
white flowers in each cluster make up a large umbel; and many
umbels to a plant attract great numbers of flies, small bees, and
wasps, which sip the freely exposed nectar apparently with only
the happiest consequences, as they transfer pollen from the male
to the proterandrous hermaphrodite flowers. Just as the
cow-parsnip shows a preponderance of flies among its visitors, so
the water hemlock seems to attract far more bees and wasps than
any of the umbel-bearing carrot tribe. It blooms from the end of
June through August.
Still another poisonous species is the HEMLOCK WATER-PARSNIP
(Sium cicutaefolium), found in swampy places throughout Canada
and the United States from ocean to ocean. The compound,
long-rayed umbels of small white flowers, fringy-bracted below,
which measure two or three inches across; the extremely variable
pinnate leaves, which may be divided into from three to six pairs
of narrow and sharply toothed leaflets (or perhaps the lower
long-stalked ones as finely dissected as a wild carrot leaf where
they grow in water), and the stout, grooved, branching stem, from
two to six feet tall, are its distinguishing characteristics.
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