374 



STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE BULLETINS. 



honey adulterated with glucose that it was difficult in the present state of 

 the science to distinguish the one from the other. This is probably true 

 of much of the honey that bees secure from the so called honey de»v. 

 I have received the following regarding honey dew from Prof. H. W. 

 Wiley: 



"In respect to the honey dew, I did not desire to express any opinion in regard to its 

 origin. I have heard so many conflicting statements on this point that really I am at a 

 loss to form a decision. My own impression is that the plant louse is the primary 

 cause of the exudation, but whether the whole of the honey (would not nectar be a 

 better term? —A. J. C) exuded passes through the organism of the louse or not is 

 rather a doubtful problem. As you say, the character of the louse itself may have 

 some effect upon the character of the honey produced, but all that the organism of the 

 louse will probably produce on the honey would be in the shape of inversion just as it 

 is inverted in the organism of the bee. It is not probable that the organism of the 

 louse will produce a dextrinoid body from sucrose or invert sugar, although I do not 

 undertake to say that such a change would be impossible." 



n Because of the above skepticism I commenced some years since to 

 collect samples of honey secured from various kinds of nectar and pro- 

 duced in widely different localities, with the hope that by extended 

 analyses we might arrive at certainty regarding our ability or inability to 

 distinguish genuine from spurious honey. I thus secured honey from 

 several different states, produced from nectar gathered from all the most 

 valuable honey plants, as well as from various kinds of honey dew. Some 

 of the honey was gathered very rapidly. Besides these samples, other 

 samples of honey were adulterated with one-third or one-fourth glucose 

 and still other was stored in clean empty combs, exclusively from pure 

 granulated sugar syrup, and partly extracted the next day and partly after it 

 was capped over All of tliese samples were simply numbered and sent to 

 Prof. H. W. Wiley of the Department of Agriculture, and most of them 

 also to Dr. R. C. Kedzie of the Michigan Agricultural College and to 

 Prof. M. A. Scovell, Director of the Experiment Station, Lexington, 

 Kentucky. 



In the following table will be found the kind of honey in each of these 

 samples by number and such other data as are of interest in this 

 investigation: 



Table 1. 



• No 9 in list of samples sent to Prof. W. A. Scoville. 



