178 EIGIITEEXTII ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



enlightenment, knowledge and education; I believe the nations of the 

 earth which have heretofore been living in darkness and illiteracy 

 are going to have education brought home to them forcibly; they are 

 going to have it pumped in to them; and the bee-keeping of the new 

 era will have to be an era of educated, scientific, trained bee-keepers. 

 Bee-keeping is a scientific thing; a practical thing. Who would go 

 into bee-keeping if it were not for the honey which we make and which 

 we sell, and on which we realize some money? What brings us here 

 tonight — is it to be entertained? We come here to these bee-keepers' 

 meetings to take home with us something which ne^t year will help 

 us to increase our honey production, and incidentally to increase our 

 pocket book. 



This bee-keeping industry being a practical branch of industry — 

 what ought it be, or should it be, in the new era towards which we 

 are coming now? Well I am not much of a prophet or the son of a 

 prophet, but one thing I dare prophesy, that unless practical bee-keeping 

 and the production of honey is made better than what we have been 

 accustomed to heretofore, we ought to l)e ashamed of ourselves. 



I do say that during this war, when we were fighting for food — 

 during this very last year when we were supposed to have reached the 

 Climax from practical bee-keeping, I don't believe we have gathered 

 one-tenth of the honey, crop of America. We have allowed nine- 

 tenths of perfectly good honey to go absolutely to waste, just on the 

 same principle of a farmer who planted one hundred acres in potatoes 

 and when the\^ were ripe dig up ten and let the other ninety go to rot, 

 lay in the ground and freeze — a man would be considered a lunatic 

 to do that; Hoover would have had him arrested — have taken the 

 high school children and turned them into his fields and gathered the 

 potatoes — but the bee-keeper sneaked away; and year after year they 

 have been in just such a position. They say there are eight hundred 

 thousand bee-keepers in America, and they say also on the other hand 

 there has been an over-production according to the Government 

 statistics in the United States to the amount of five pounds of honey 

 per colony. Ladies and gentlemen, five pounds of honey per colony 

 is what you produce on the average. No"w I know that men like the 

 members of the National Bee-keepers' Association will average one 

 hundred. Suppose that you here are producing 100 pounds per colony 

 and the average is five, how much does the other fellow produce? 

 Or rather, how many produce nothing to lower the average? There- 

 fore when it comes to practical bee-keeping we ought to be really 

 ashamed of ourselves. 



In the dairy line we say we have cows that produce all the way 

 from 100 to 150 pounds of butter fat on the average. Suppose we have 

 cows that produce only twenty pounds of butter fat, what would 

 you do with such a cow? Kill it. The bee-keeper is the other way; 

 I believe that the bees are all good, and if somebody ought to be killed, 

 it is not the bee. 



In practical bee-keeping therefore in this new era, we will have to 

 modernize; we will have to make ourselves accessible to modern 

 methods; human nature is so conservative, it will stay in the same 

 spot, year after year without moving. You know the law of inertia. 



