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The official founding meeting will be held in early May. At this meeting, trust members will be appointed to the General Council and an executive will be formed. At the May meeting of the Natural History Society, we should nominate our society's representative to the Nature Trust.

Kathy Martin Biology Dept. University of P.E.I.

MICROFLORA or There's more than meets the eye in a bean plant

Learning to identify and name plants is a difficult task, but once we have acquired this knowledge we feel secure with it. A bean plant is a bean plant, Phaseolus vulgaris, nothing more, nothing less. Well, it is certainly nothing less but it is very much more. Every wild and cultivated plant is a complex

of many organisms which co—exist on or around the leaves, stems and roots.

Let's take a look at each of the main parts of the bean plant and find out what else is there. Careful scrutiny of the leaves with the naked eye will reveal a network of veins and leaf hairs, but if we go to the microscope we find that there are colonies of micro—organisms living on the leaf surface. There are yeast cells which look like budding balloons, there are minute bacteria, and spores of several different kinds of fungi. Some of the

spores are germinating to give a thread-like network of fungal hyphae on the leaf surface.

BEAN SEEDLING AND INHABITANTS

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growing in roof 66”