50 EIGHTEENTH AXXUAL REPORT OF THE 



is what you call him — at New Holland, said to me one morning, " How 

 do you go to work to make — I have forgotten how many pounds — of 

 honey out of so many pounds of sugar?" I asked him what he meant 

 and I found that he had got hold of such literature as Brother Dadant 

 has referred to, being a food administrator, and had been told that we 

 as honey producers were entitled to so much sugar in the spring for 

 feeding purposes, and he wanted to know how we would go to work to 

 make so much honey out of so much sugar. He was a learned man; 

 he was from Holland and he was sincere in it. 



The President. — He was misled by the Government. 



Mr. Tyler. — Yes, he was. It took me quite a little time to 

 explain to him how we could feed out sugar to the bees and that at 

 the time of the honey flow we could get the honey. He had the im- 

 pression that we were going to manufacture so many pounds of honey 

 out of so many pounds of su^ar. 



The President. — Well, the members of the Association that had 

 charge of the booth at the fair grounds, or some of the exhibits, will 

 Hterally bear out what Mr. Dadant has said about the question of 

 artificial honey. We used to have some very nice comb honey in 

 sections in the center of the booth, and the principal thing that one 

 of our men had to do out there was to tell the people that it was not 

 manufactured, that it was impossible to manufacture comb honey, 

 and he was kept busy every day all through the fair. He can testify 

 to that himself. 



Some of the older men and women have read this article, that the 

 Government chemist had handed out in rather a jest, but which, as 

 such jests prove to be, is always dangerous. That reminds me of 

 another jest that has been handed out in the last four or five days 

 about an experiment in the Naval Department, of feeding ''flu" 

 germs to some soldiers and sailors and they got fat on them. That 

 appeared in every paper in the United States last week. There is not 

 a speck of truth in it, so far as it reads, but there has been an experi- 

 ment going on to give the men a serum and then give them the germ, 

 and the men did get fat because they were immune, due to the serun\. 



Anyone else have anything to say? 



Mr. Dadant. — While Prof. Wiley has done a great deal of good 

 by the Pure Food Law, and that has been done in the last fifteen or 

 eighteen years, he did a great deal of harm by that thoughtless joke 

 in this article. Evidently he found out that people would swallow 

 anything. Mankind will swallow the most wonderful things, and the 

 more impossible they are the better they like them, the oftener they 

 repeat them. We see that everywhere. He simply made an attempt 

 at a joke, said that we manufactured honey with proper machinery, 

 made the comb, put the honey in; and then he spoke about the manu- 

 facturing of eggs in the same article, I understand, and those eggs 

 looked like hen's eggs, only they would not hatch. I don't know 

 whether there are people who still believe that they manufacture eggs, 

 but I know positively that there are people who believe that there is 

 manufactured comb honey. There is an easy way to convince a 

 person who is willing to listen to the fact that honey is not manufactured. 



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