644 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



sity. We think it is but it's a mistake. Don't you think we'd live just 

 as long and perhaps a little longer, don't you think we'd be just as 

 strong and perhaps a little stronger if we didn't eat so much meat? How 

 many millions of people there are in this old world who scarcely ever 

 taste it — people just as strong and just as healthy as we who kill and 

 devour helpless creatures just to satisfy a perverted appetite! Sta- 

 tistics gathered by the Department of Agriculture for 1911 show that 

 the people of the United States consumed one hundred and seventy-two 

 pounds of meat per capita and I said they didn't average one pound 

 of honey! 



But I don't need to lecture you beekeepers on the benefits of using 

 honey, unless it is to urge its use a little more freely in your own 

 households. And don't forget to extol its virtues to the heathen round 

 about who use meat so excessively. 



I have known men who kept a few colonies of bees to take the very 

 first filled supers to town to sell instead of leaving them in the kitchen 

 and telling the women folks to help themselves. This class of bee- 

 keepers does more to make honey unpopular than many suppose. They 

 are generally farmers who have little experience and who don't seem 

 to realize that honey is a luxury and therefore must be put up in attract- 

 ive style. Perhaps they take it to their local market in the super just 

 as it came off the hive, propolized and travel-stained, and by the time 

 the grocer gets the sections out it is a mess. He is disgusted with it 

 and wishes the stuff in Ballyhack. It is anything but tempting to a 

 customer who might be in a humor to buy if it looked nice. 



Getting back to my subject, I will say that one way to increase the 

 use of honey is to use more of it on the table in the home where it is 

 produced. 



When company comes what luxury is more dainty and inviting than 

 a section of the finest honey you have in the house? Call the attention 

 of the guest to it. Nine-tenths of all the visitors we have eat honey. 

 They like it. Perhaps when they go home and plan to entertain com- 

 pany themselves they will think of the delicious honey they ate at 

 The Shelter and buy some. I will here state that our table is seldom 

 set without honey, and we eat it. We never get tired of it. A pound 

 section disappears in company with a pound of butter — both going the 

 same route to the gastronomic laboratory along with pancakes, bread, 

 biscuits or muffins as the case may be. The good Book says, "Butter 

 and honey shall he eat when he knoweth to refuse the evil and choose 

 the good." 



By the way, isn't it a wonderful laboratory that we carry around 

 with us, the stomach? While we're working or walking, studying or 

 writing, loafing or sleeping, the heterogeneous conglomeration of mate- 

 rials we have dumped into it are assorted in this laboratory and assigned, 

 each particle to its proper work and function in the building of a man. 



The way to increase the use of honey is to popularize it. Advertise 

 by any method you choose but be sure to advertise by selling only the 

 best. If we produce comb honey every section ought to be so clean and 

 attractive that it will tempt someone to buy. I never put on the market 

 an unfinished section, and every section is as thoroughly scraped for 



