"Waite’s profound research into the nature and cause of the of the was spectacular and had far-reaching results. He had an incubator full of the pear blight organism, Bacillus amylovorus, and could produce the blight at will by dipping a needle into the culture and inserting it into the growing tip of a pear branch. He believed that bees carried the blight from infected flowers to healthy ones. Doctor Maxwell, a little country doctor of , challenged Waite to prove this on his trees. The results were disastrous! A short time after Waite inoculated the flowers on a few trees, Doctor Maxwell suddenly realized that the bees had spread the blight all over his orchard. He sent a frantic telegram to Washington, but there was little that could be done, for the disease had made such headway that Waite could not stop it. Waite next went South and there made another far-reaching discovery. In an immense orchard of s, the trees mysteriously failed to bear fruit. Waite managed to solve the problem, and returned to Washington in a great state of excitement. His discovery was that the Bartlett pear flower is practically sterile to its own pollen. Hence he found that the only fruit was on trees along the outer edge of the big orchard. He interpreted this phenomenon as indicating that the bees from near-by orchards of other varieties had brought foreign pollen and pollinated the first trees they came to. Basing his experiments on this assumption he proved that it was correct. It was a very real discovery, a precursor of what has now become a generally accepted principle of horticulture, the principle of mixed plantings."