250 State Board of Agriculture, &c. 



will prove ; and the West Indies, Mexico, and even Africa, 

 join in to eke out the supply ; all of which is like carrying 

 coals to Newcastle, for probably no country on tlie globe 

 has the resources for supplying her people so abundantly 

 with honey as ours. In spite of all these facts, no people 

 are probably worse provided than ours, not one in twenty of 

 whom taste honey from one year's end to another. We 

 could vie with Switzerland, which boasts her honey against 

 the world, and sets it before the traveller wherever he eats, 

 in public or private, if we would conserve the Heaven dis- 

 tilled nectar that God diflfuses over all the surface of our 

 broad land, almost as universal as the air we breathe. But 

 the fact is patent that we do not do it. Well, what can bo 

 done about it ? 



The discoveries made within a few years of the nature 

 a,nd proper management of bees, has made the practical 

 solution of this question comparatively easy. Movable 

 comb hives remove most of the difficulties of old time beo 

 keeping. Instead of destroying the bees for their honey, as 

 is still done in some parts, the colony can be perpetuated 

 indefinitely, and so directed in their increase and labor, as 

 to render results not only comparatively certain, but 

 immense, as compared with the products of former times. 



The theory and practice of bee keeping upon modern 

 principles is so fully taught in books and periodicals of so 

 easy access, that whoever will may not lack the means of 

 knowledge, and it hardly seems proper, in a meeting like 

 this, to inflict upon those who have no aspirations after 

 honey in " the natural way," the details and minutias of the 

 process. I shall therefore pass rapidly to a close, simply 



