" These remarks apply
more particularly to the north half of the coast. Farther south there is
less moisture, less forest shade, and the honey flora is less varied.
The Sierra region is the largest of the three main divisions of the
bee-lands of the State, and the most regularly varied in its
subdivisions, owing to their gradual rise from the level of the Central
Plain to the alpine summits. The foot-hill region is about as dry and
sunful, from the end of May until the setting in of the winter rains, as
the plain. There are no shady forests, no damp glens, at all like those
lying at the same elevations in the Coast Mountains. The social
compositae of the plain, with a few added species, form the bulk of the
herbaceous portion of the vegetation up to a height of 1500 feet or
more, shaded lightly here and there with oaks and Sabine Pines, and
interrupted by patches of ceanothus and buckeye. Above this, and just
below the forest region, there is a dark, heath-like belt of chaparral,
composed almost exclusively of _Adenostoma fasciculata_, a bush
belonging to the rose family, from five to eight feet high, with small,
round leaves in fascicles, and bearing a multitude of small white
flowers in panicles on the ends of the upper branches.
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