ILLINOIS STATE BEE-KEBPEES' ASSOCIATION". 83 



the second time than he was the first simply because he has an enmity 

 towards all inspection and the inspector as well, so that one of the main 

 functions of the apiary inspector is not only to eradicate disease by the 

 direct method, but also to remove the indirect cause and proceed that 

 way. 



I am getting a Httle off my subject, I want to come back to that 

 a little later, so that I will go back to the bee-keepers, and take up the 

 next class and that is the speciahst bee-keeper. The speciahst bee- 

 keeper usually is his own inspector, because the question of disease 

 is vital and there we see right away the benefits of education. Any man 

 who is securing a profit from his bees, once he realizes what disease 

 is and is able to diagnose disease, that man is his own inspector from 

 then on, and the specialist, reahzing that he has a great deal of money 

 invested in bees and that if properly cared for will be a source of profit 

 to him, he rarely calls on the inspector except to visit and inspect 

 some smaller apiaries in his vicinity which may be giving him trouble. 

 So that usually the trips of the inspector to the specialist are fre- 

 quently visits of mutual value and I might say that the inspector 

 picks up very many valuable pointers from the specialists in bee-keeping. 

 The oiJy trouble is that the inspector usually gets so many calls from 

 the smaller bee-keepers that he is not able to spend as much time 

 as he would like to do with the specialists. There are very few of 

 us who fail to pick up many valuable pointers during the course of 

 a year from bee-keepers. We know this man has one plan that is 

 good and another man has another plan that is good and in that way 

 the apiary inspector himself is always increasing his knowledge of 

 bee-keeping and a great many of these pointers we get from special- 

 ists. The specialist takes care of disease himself, because he realizes 

 that if disease is allowed to spread, then his profits are gone, so that 

 the specialist bee-keeper, is very rarely named among the class of 

 bee-keeper with which the inspector has any more to do than to 

 visit. 



There is another class that I would like to mention, and I might 

 say that we get men and women in this class from all the other classes 

 I have mentioned, probably with the exception of the bee-keepers 

 who never attend to the bees in any way at all. These are the cranks. 

 Now, I do not want you to take that name crank in the wrong way, 

 because we must remember that Langstroth and men of his kind, 

 men like Charles Dadant and men of the old schools who have found 

 out something that is of interest and value to the bee-keeping industry 

 up to date, those men were called cranks. We can easily imagine that 

 when Hruschka started the honey extractor, that he was called a crank 

 and when foundation was first manufactured, that manufacturer 

 was called a crank, so that we want to look upon the cranks among 

 bee-keepers with tolerance. Most of us, if we are not already cranks, 

 develop into cranks of some kind, we are always dreaming that we 

 can devise some scheme so that we can absolutely control swarming 

 so that we will not have to worry about it. Another man is thinking 

 how he can find out the way to make two queens Uve in one hive and 

 there is another man devising some scheme of an entrance that will 

 solve all troubles of robbing and another man is developing some 



