-J.-' 



96 



SIXTEENTH ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE 



ten or twelve cents retail, than there 

 is in a pound of meat that costs you 

 fifteen to twenty-five cents, or a pound 

 of butter that costs you from twenty- 

 flve to forty cents. That has been 

 fully demonstrated. 



The President— I should like to con- 

 firm Mr. Baxter in that respect in one 

 ■way. I am a reformed druggist, for 

 thirty-five years I have had a drug 

 store and during a large part of that 

 time I had a" great deal of stomach 

 trouble, ijidigestion a great deal, and 

 frequently honey was about the only 

 thing I could eat, bread and honey I 

 could eat quite readily, while other 

 foods did not agree with me. 



Mr. Sanders — But one has to be 

 careful not to overdo it. 



The President— That is true, yet I 

 could eat honey in quantities that peo- 

 ple would say would surely hurt me. 

 Some six or eight years ago I sold out 

 my drug store and since then I have 

 been out of doors most of the time 

 and have had no trouble of this kind, 

 but I surely think honey is of great 

 value in such cases as mine. 



A Member — ^Does it not act as a 

 poison to some systems? 



Mr. Baxter — Some people cannot 

 touch it. 



The President — There are some peo- 

 ple cannot eat very much of it, it 

 .makes them sick, but that is true x>f 

 almost everything else. Some people 

 cannot eat strawberries, some cannot 

 eat apples, but it is not true in the 

 majority of cases. 



Mr. McElvain — Would honey made 

 from poisonous plants be poisonous? 



Mr. Baxter — That has not been de- 

 termined. Some claim it will and 

 some claim it will not, but in the gen- 

 eral run of honey that you get out of 

 the hives it would be impossible from 

 any poisonous plant to get enough to 

 hurt a person; the only thing injured 

 would be the bee itself gathering it 

 from the poisonous plant. 



Mr. Richardson — ^How much truth is 

 there in the belief that seems quite 

 generally prevalent that the bee will 

 avoid these poisonous plants? 



Mr. Baxter — I am not posted enough 

 to say as to that. I have seen them 

 working on some of the poisonous 

 plants, but to what extent they work 

 there and how much honey they 

 gather from there, I could not say. 



Mr. Richardson — I have heard the 



statement made that bees as a rule 

 would avoid poisonous plants. 



Mr. Baxter — Yes. 



Mr. Baxter then showed pictures of 

 his apiary, house, etc., and said: 



As to the profits of bee-keeping, I 

 told you there was no business as 

 profitable, and if you knew just what 

 a person could make out of bee-keep- 

 ing you would agree with me. Bees 

 are not costly. You can go into the 

 country and buy bees at'two or three 

 or four dollars *^ a colony. Truly, they 

 are not in hives, but you can get the 

 kind of hives that are the best to 

 transfer them, so that the original cost 

 would not be very much. In 1882 I 

 bought 90 colonies of bees, Italians, 

 with one extracting super on top of 

 them in the spring of the year for $10 

 a hive; that is pretty high. That year 

 those bees made me something over 

 $1,500. That one year I paid for all 

 those bees and paid for my time and 

 all expenses and had some profit left. 

 That is not done every year, remem- 

 ber, but a man that is on to his job, 

 in a reasonably good location, wher- 

 ever there is white clover and plenty 

 of smartweed and Spanish needle, can 

 make a reasonably good thing out of 

 keeping bees. In forty years that I 

 have been in the bee business I have 

 only had two total failures, when I had 

 to feed my bees, that was in 1906 and 

 1914. In 1914 I had to buy 9,000 pounds 

 of sugar to tide my bees over and 

 keep them from starving, and I did 

 pretty nearly the same thing in 1906. 

 In 1883 I took a number of bees out 

 into the country, forty-one hives, and 

 those bees produced something like 

 seventy, mostly by swarming, because 

 I did not know then just how to con- 

 trol swarming; I was rather new to 

 the work. Those bees produced during 

 . the year 23% barrels of honey, which 

 averaged about 550 pounds per barrel, 

 making a total of 12,925 pounds of 

 honey, which sold that year at 9 cents 

 a pound wholesale by the barrel, pro- 

 ducing $1,163.25, or an average of 

 $28.37 per colony of bees that cost $10. 

 That is pretty nearly 300 per cent on 

 the cost price. In what can you invest 

 your money to make such profits as 

 that? That was the best crop I had in 

 forty years, but the average is very 

 good. In 1889 I got 65 barrels of honey 

 from about 180 colonies, and I have had 

 a good many good years like that; 



