ILLINOIS STATE BEE-KEEPEES' ASSOCIATION. 77 



However, the amateurs also provide us with quite a little amuse- 

 ment. I have had letters asking for a setting of bees' eggs, others 

 want to start in the business and want to buy a pair of bees. Then we 

 get letters again, from ladies, who state that they have a garden which 

 contains a lot of flowers and how many colonies of bees could they 

 keep in the garden, and I had an instance last year of a man — ^this 

 is pretty hard on the men- — who had about four city blocks in his 

 .garden, his garden contained that amount of land, and to give his bees 

 more room he had placed one colony on each corner of the lot. He 

 stated that the bees would be able to forage around better in that way 

 and get more honey. 



We also have a good many inquiries from amateurs as to how 

 the bees can be wintered. Many of them take the bees down in the 

 cellar and screen them up tightly, then put them near the windows. 

 They they will write that the bees are dying very rapidly and want to 

 know what is wrong. We find others who will put them in an upstairs 

 room without any protection at all, and in that way, will lose the bees. 

 However, the great point about the amateur bee-keeper is his interest, 

 and I might say that if an amateur bee-keeper is started on the right 

 road, then there is a great deal more hope for the amateur to develop 

 into a specialist, than any other class, that is, there will be more ama- 

 teurs developed into specialists than from the other classes of bee-keepers 

 which I shall mention. 



Another way in which amateurs are sometimes developed, is by 

 reading a popular article on bee-keeping in some of the magazines. 

 I had a striking instance of this last year. Mr. Pellett wrote an article 

 for one of the ladies journals, and I had a large number of inquiries, 

 which were addressed to the state inspector for Iowa, asking for in- 

 formation regarding the way that one should start off in the bee- 

 keeping business, and I might also say that this winter Mr. Pellett 

 told me that one of the ladies in giving the result of the summer's 

 experience in her work and the benefit's she had derived from the paper, 

 mentioned that she had made quite a little sum of money from having 

 started in bee-keeping through reading that article in the magazine. 

 So that sometimes articles of that kind, with good information well 

 given, are a source of benefit to bee-keepers. 



Another way in which amateur bee-keepers are sometimes de- 

 veloped, and there has been some criticism in the past regarding this 

 method of developing them, is by the teachers of bee-keeping at agri- 

 cultural colleges. This criticism, however, has lessened a great deal 

 of its force now. A great many of the bee-keepers, who developed 

 into the specialist class a few years ago, were afraid that the teachers 

 of bee-keeping in the various agricultural colleges, and the inspectors 

 by giving public lectures and illustrated lectures and that kind of 

 propaganda, would make too many bee-keepers. But I might say 

 this, that in almost every case those young men and young women 

 and older men and older women who take courses, whether they be the 

 short course or regular course at agricultural colleges, or listen to 

 lectures by speciahsts in bee-keeping, in almost every case those men 

 and women are given both sides of the question of bee-keeping and 

 when they start in they are told that while bee-keeping can be made 



