Answering Mr. Littlepage, I have apparently managed to get some crosses back and forth between chestnuts, and oaks, and beech, this year. I have a number of those crosses now under way that are apparently good hybrids.
DR. STABLER: A cross between a chestnut and a beech?
DR. MORRIS: Yes, I think so. You see, I have got to wait a year or so until the plants develop later characteristics. All of these parent trees are pretty closely related, you see. The blooming period between the different ones may be as much as two or three weeks, or three months apart, in fact. I have cross pollinated hazels and oaks, this year. The way to do that is to find correspondents at the extreme limit of the blossoming range of the species, who will send pollen. For instance, Professor Hume, in Florida, sends me chestnut pollen in time to cross my oaks, and Professor Conser, of the University of Maine, has some beeches that blossom in time for me to cross with chinquapins and oak trees. That is one way to do it.
Another way is to put your pollen in cold storage with some sphagnum moss, just put a little damp moss in your box with the pollen and put it in cold storage, and keep it at just about forty, above the freezing point. Another way is to put branches with dormant flower buds in cold storage. Hazels, for instance, may be kept for six months in this way. Put them in water, in the sun, and you soon have flowers furnishing pollen. I would take up the whole session of two days here if you were to ask too many questions along that line. (Laughter.)
Mr. Littlepage's question about the weevils. The question may be settled very easily where there are not many chinquapin trees. That is the case in Connecticut. Collect all the nuts, and you collect all of the weevil larvae. Curiously enough, the common chestnut weevil, that had become very abundant, has disappeared locally with the disappearance of our American chestnut, and has not attacked our chinquapins. If you have an orchard of chinquapins and collect all the nuts you will soon dispose of the weevils. That is the only way that I know of for disposing of the weevils. Eat them up. (Laughter.) You can pick out the weevil chestnuts fairly well if you toss all of the nuts into a cup of water and pick out the ones that float. Pound them up with a mallet and throw them into the chicken coop.