882 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



Dec. 29, 1904. 



mission who takes so much interest in honey and bees. I 

 move that a vote of thanks be tendered him for his in- 

 teresting paper tonight. [Carried.] 



Pres. Harris — We feel proud to be honored with a man 

 of th^s stripe who fearlessly comes before any organization, 

 it matters not what, and tells the truth. 



Mr. Reinecke — I think if you let a paper like this come 

 before the Associated Press it will do a great deal of good. 



Pres. Harris then called upon Mr. E. R. Root, to address 

 the convention on 



cone HONEY CANARDS AND THEIR EFFECTS 

 ON CONSUHERS. 



Mr. Root — I intended to bring here certain papers that 

 have been publishing certain statements with reference to 

 comb honey. I don't think the members of this Association 

 really know what has been published in the papers. You 

 have had a sample of it, but that is mild compared with 

 some of the stuff that has gone out during the last six 

 months. I have a few papers that I will bring over to- 

 morrow so that you can see them if you desire. 



I wish to say before I begin the reading of this paper 

 that you could not have anticipated my suggestions in re- 

 gard to some things that this convention should have done, 

 any better than you did this morning during the time I was 

 at your session; and perhaps I had better leave out that 

 portion of my paper as you have already carried out some 

 of the suggestions. They tell about great minds going in 

 the same channel, I am glad my mind has been along the 

 lines that you carried out this morning. 



I have one letter here, which, with the permission of 

 Mr. Hutchinson, I will read a sentence from, as indicating 

 what the scientific men in this country think of comb honey. 

 You remember Prof. L. V. Allyn said somethino- about comb 

 honey being manufactured, containing paraffin and glucose, 

 and something else, as if that was an evidence of manufac- 

 ture. When that was called to his attention as a mistake 

 he wrote to Mr. Hutchinson, and I will read this sentence: 

 "The finding of a large percentage of paraffin and glucose 

 in comb honey, and in addition reading many references from 

 scientific papers, naturally leads one to suspect its adultera- 

 tion." 



I doubt if there is a more important question to come be- 

 fore this body of representative bee-keepers of the United 

 States than the one before us now. The recent canards and 

 sensational stories published in reputable papers and mag- 

 azines about Yankee ingenuity, combs made of paraffin, etc., 

 have deepened the distrust that was already existing in the 

 mind of the public as to the purity and genuineness of our 

 product. So persistently have these stories been circulated 

 from time to time in the daily papers, especially in their 

 Sunday editions, that consumers believe that it "is an un- 

 nuestionable fact that can not be successfully contradicted, 

 that the beautiful little combs on the market are not the 

 work of the bees, but the consummate skill of man. But 

 these lies are not confined to current literature. If we 

 turn to some of our standard works of reference, cyclopedias, 

 cook-books, medical works, and the like, we shall be surprised 

 to see how many of the writers of note, and scientific men 

 who ought to know better, tell, in all soberness, that much 

 of the comb honey on the market is manufactured by man 

 out of paraffin, filled with glucose, and capped over by 

 machinery. When these so-called authorities vouch for such 

 statements in the standard works on the shelves of our 

 homes, can we wonder that the comb-honey lies break out 

 every now and then in the magazines and papers? Nearly 

 every year has seen its quota of comb-honey canards; but 

 the year 1904 surpasses them all. Let us glance for a minute 

 at some of the leading publications that have given currency 

 to these comb honey stories. 



First on the list is the Ladies' Home Journal, one of 

 the most widely circulated magazines in the world. The 

 editorial writer. Dr. Emma Walker, based her information 

 on statements made by the professors in colleges, and the 

 writers for encyclopedias, etc., instead of going to practical 

 men who should know, if any one, the truth about their 

 business. 



Then there was the Pittsburg Gazette and the Cleveland 

 Plain Dealer, in their respective Sunday editions; The Sioux 

 City Tribune and a dozen others, each one of them leading 

 journals for their respective parts of tlie country, that have 

 helped to give these stories a boost. Tlien there was Pro- 

 fessor Allyn, of the State Normal School at Westfield, Mass. 

 He sent a statement to the Springfield Republican, to the 

 effect that he had a sample of manufactured comb honey 



which he analyzed and found to contain glucose and paraffin; 

 and, vk'orst of all, that it was on display at the great St. Louis 

 exposition. A number of these papers, in response to a 

 deluge of letter from bee-keepers and bee-journal editors, 

 have published retractions. It should be stated, in this con- 

 nection, that Mr. Frank Benton, of the Bureau of Apicul- 

 ture, at Washington, D. C, has rendered no small service 

 in getting corrections. 



The Sunday papers are the worst offenders of the whole 

 lot. They are nothing more nor less than cheap magazines 

 containing a great deal of good as well as bad. A large 

 amount of the stuff they publish is sensational, intended 

 to be such, to make the paper sell. One large Sunday met- 

 ropolitan journal, in defending its course in publishing such 

 a sensational lie about comb honey, did so by quoting Bar- 

 num's old saying, that the dear people like to be humbugged. 

 It admitted to our representative that it had no foundation 

 in fact for the story it published ; that it instructed its re- 

 porter to get up the biggest yarn he could, and he did. With 

 this plain admission we got retraction, after a good deal of 

 hammering, and a final threat to sue them for damages. 



All that I have thus far said is familiar history to the 

 average reader of the bee-papers. So frequent have been the 

 appearance of these stories that the bee-keeping public has 

 become hardened. While the bee-keeper himself is angered 

 and disgusted beyond measure, he has been in the habit of 

 forgetting all about it ; then when there is a lull in the re- 

 currence of the lies, he rests easy, thinking that no harm 

 has been done. But the object of this paper is to show that 

 a fearful damage has been done to the comb honejf market, 

 and you now demand the proof. Here it is : 



It is well known, I think, that there was a large crop of 

 comb honey in 1903, and a very light crop this year. If you 

 will compare the markets you will see that there is no ad- 

 vance in prices. On the other hand you will see that the 

 market is described as slow, easy, or indifferent ; while last 

 year, in spite of the large crop taken, it was described as , 

 firm. Had it not been for the articles published in some of 

 our representative journals about manufactured comb honey, 

 we might expect the market this fall to be unusually firm ; 

 but look at the quotations, and I think you will see that 

 that condition does not now exist. Suppose, for example, 

 that we had had a light crop last year, and a heavy one 

 this year. The comb-honey lies that have appeared would 

 have made the prices go all to pieces ; but because of the 

 scarcity of the general crop, we have been barely able to 

 hold our own. 



Of course, I do not claim that prices are now unusually 

 depressed. The fact is, they have not advanced as they have 

 on other products and I think this is because, very largely, 

 the general public does not care to buy what it supposes to 

 be glucose put up in fancy paraffin combs that are as perfect 

 as the eye could vv'ish. 



Again : Bee-keepers who have peddled their honey around 

 to customers direct are met on every side by the question, 

 "Is your honey made by the bees?" In some cases it is al- 

 most impossible for the honey producer to convince them that 

 there is no such thing as manufactured comb honey, even 

 when he offers to give them $1,000 if they will furnish the 

 evidence. In all the articles published in the bee-journals, 

 I do not remember one in which the peddler did not refer 

 to the distrust of the public as to the genuineness of his 

 product. So difficult has it been to sell comb honey that 

 some of our bee-keeping friends have been compelled to cut 

 the honey out of the sections, mix it with a good grade of 

 extracted, rig out as a farmer who has got a few bees, and, 

 presto ! that very same honey would go like hot cakes, with- 

 out a question as to its purity. In the South chunk honey 

 is getting to be quite a specialty; and it may be that in the 

 North, in some localities where these comb-honey lies have 

 got in their deadly work, our bee-keepets will have to cater 

 to the chunk-honey trade. 



In the course of our business, within a year we have 

 hundreds of traveling men who call upon us to sell raw 

 material of various kinds. When they see our crates of 

 honey they slily ask the question if they may be permitted 

 to know how we make the stuff, supposing, of course, we are 

 headquarters for the product. Great is their consternation 

 when we tell them that there is no such thing as manu- 

 factured comb honey, and that we will pay them $1,000 if 

 they will produce a single sample of artificial comb, filled 

 with glucose and capped by machinery, so close an imitation 

 that it could not be readily told from the genuine. They tell 

 us everybody out their way believes comb honey is manu- 

 factured ; that they would buy honey, and would buy quan- 



