47 
gardens, winter and others, from the Chalybeate to the Casino. 
What he thought of this last scheme Mr. Harrison would not 
venture to say. 
The lecture was under the auspices of the Society, but, 
having realized its exceptional interest to the public, the Director 
of the Library, Mr. H. D. Roberts, secured it as one of the 
lectures associated with that institution, and thus gave it the 
wider public audience, which it deserved. 
FRIDAY, MAY ist, 1908. 
Forty Years of Bee- Keeping, 
Mr. B. LOMAX, 
Illustrated by Living Specimens and Appliances. 
HE experiences that Mr. Benjamin Lomax has gained in forty 
years of bee-keeping were made the subject of a highly 
interesting lecture to the Society. Any subject that Mr. Lomax 
touches he makes interesting, and he compressed a remarkable 
amount of entertaining and instructive information in the course 
of his pleasantly delivered, chatty address. So far was the lecture 
removed from the conventional that Mr. Lomax brought with 
him a hive full of live bees, and passed it round among the 
audience, just to show them what a harmless creature the bee is 
when properly treated. In the old days you armed yourself with 
gloves and a veil when you went honey gathering, and you suffo- 
cated your bees. Now Mr. Lomax takes off his coat and rolls up 
his sleeves, and would no more think of suffocating the bees than 
he would of cutting down an apple tree to get at the apples. 
They used to suffocate the bees, though, in the days when he 
first saw the inside of a hive, and that was 62 years ago in 
Tasmania. ‘Then honey-collecting was a tragedy. ‘The 4o years 
ago, when Mr. Lomax first started bee keeping, was when he was 
surveying in the bush in Victoria. They found a large swarm of 
bees there and hived them in a tea chest. If they wanted honey 
they blew in a puff of smoke, and took what they could before the 
bees recovered from their fright. As Mr. Lomax showed, it is 
