Nov. 28, 1901. 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL, 



759 



Dr. Mason — In preparinjj my bees 

 for winter, about the middle of Sep- 

 tember, I select what brood there may 

 be and put it in one side of the hive; 

 then I commence with combs of honey 

 and fill the remainder of the hive. I 

 winter bees in the cellar, of course, and 

 I don't have an)' spring- dwindling, 

 and they begin to breed in January. I 

 wouldn't g-ive a cent for them if they 

 didn't begin in January. I have had 



bees that came out of the cellar 

 stronger than they went in in the fall, 

 and no dysentery or spring dwindling. 

 That is the difference of locality, I 

 suppose. 



Mr. McEvoy — No, it is the difference 

 between indoor and outdoor wintering. 



Mr. Niver — I would like to ask Mr. 

 McEvoy the cost of this contracting 

 the brood-nest, how much he would 

 take to contract Mr. Coggshall's 2,000. 



Mr. McEvoy — I don't think I could 

 ever get through with it, because I 

 guess he has over 2,000 colonies. 



A Member — I would like to ask Mr. 

 Coggshall at what time, if he ever has 

 any feeding to do, he does it? 



W. L. Coggshall — I never yet fed 

 any sugar. I always have honey 

 enough. 



^Continued next week.) 



Contributed Articles. 



Selling Comb Honey by Case vs. Weight. 



BY K. A. BURNETT &. CO. 



FOR some little time there has been an effort made to sell 

 comb lioney by the case and count of sections Instead* of 

 by the actual weight of the honey contained therein. 

 There is before me as 1 write two letters from parties desir- 

 iiicf to sell their honey in this way; namely, so much per case 

 of 24 sections, without reference to the actual weight of 

 honey contained in the case. Both of these parties (who are 

 car-load shijipers) were requested to name their price per 

 pound. In reply to that letter, one of them writes; 



" 111 reply. I will state that it is not possible to quote any honey by 

 the pound, tor the reason that the different honey-producers use dif- 

 ferent-weight cases, and it would be an endless task to arrive at the 

 net weight of 1000 or more cases." 



The other one writes; 



"In reply to your favor of the 2Cth inst.. I bsg to fay that we 

 make it a rule to sell by the case only, as selling by the pound would 

 put a premium on the non-separatored honey, which is not as satisfac- 

 tory to the dealers as Uie nice separatored article, which is much more 

 even in weight and less liable to injury by careless handling. We hope 

 that selling by the case will soon come into more general use." 



We hardly care to make any comment on the foregoing 

 quotations, but merely introduce them so that the reader may 

 know that there is more or less honey in the comb being 

 offered for sale in thi< way. To say that by selling by count 

 is more satisfactory than buying by the pound brings to our 

 memory the old adage so often repeated, that. "It is never 

 wise to buy a pig in the hag." for, in all proliability. it is a pig, 

 yet when the bag is removed it may not at all meet the e.xpec- 

 tations of the buyer. 



It may be conceded tliat some, if not many, of our expert 

 bee-manipulators can get the bees to store in each section a 

 given quantity, tilling each section with no more, or no less, 

 than is contained in all the neighboring ones; now if this were 

 the case generally, the use of scales miglit well he abandoned ; 

 but if it takes the bees longer to put Iti ounces of honey into 

 a section than it does 12. and a correspondingly longer time 

 to put in 12 than it would nine, is it not reasonable to infer 

 that some man less scrupulous than his neighbor would man- 

 age it so that he could get a little less honey in the section, 

 and thus a greater lot of sections tilled in a given time by the 

 bees than his neighbor could? He would then be able to get 

 as much money for the number of sections as his neighbor 

 produced, and, having produced a fourth or a third more tilled 

 sections, he would be that much better otT tinancially than his 

 neighbor; and the purchaser would have that much less honey 

 for an ccpial sum of money; therefore, it would be only a little 

 time before a case of 24 so-called one-pound sections, instead 

 of weighing from 22 to 24 pounds, as was supposed to be the 

 case at the beginning of this method, we soon tind that the 

 cases, wliile containing 24 sections, in many instances weigh 

 from IT to 19 pounds. 



Although this method of selling honey in any quantity 

 has not been in vogue more than three or four years, already 

 we find a 24-section case to weigh nearer 19 to 20 poiiiuls 

 than 28 to 24; yet there arc some producers in a collection of 

 a thousand cases of comb honey, whose cases weigh from 28 

 to 24 pounds, while others run from 17 to 19 pounds, there 

 lieing no apparent difference in the grade of honey when 

 viewed through the glass exposure, but there Is, when sections 

 are compared with on(^ another, a noticeable difference in tire 

 thickness of the comb. 



If all men were evolved up to one standard, there would 

 be little need of checking one's accounts against another, but 

 inasmuch as we are not yet, as a whole, at the stage where 

 we will not practice deceit, for the sake of personal gain — a 

 false gain to be sure, but. nevertheless, one that is daily prac- 

 ticed by a very great number of us — and the desire that is so 

 prevalent to excel our neighbor in getting the best of a bar- 

 gain, is so constantly in mind that this method of selling 

 honey by the case without reference to the net weight of the 

 contents is a great temptation to a moral nature not overly 

 strong. It would be as fair to buy our sugar and tea by the 

 bagful without weighing it. because the merchant says, "My 

 bags hold just so much in weight and it is unnecessary to 

 weigh the goods I serve you for so much;" while it is true that 

 since paper bags are made by machinery they vary but little 

 in size, the machinery being so nicely arranged that it cuts 

 the paper with great accuracy, folds it with corresponding ac- 

 curacy; thus the bag when complete, if properly filled, will 

 each time contain almost exactly the same amount of sugar, 

 tea or coffee. But there are some merchants who want to 

 sell a bag of tea. coffee or sugar for a little less than their com- 

 petitors, and to enable them to do so, and yet make a protit, 

 they arrange for a bag that will hold a little less than the so- 

 called live or ten pound hag they have previously been using, 

 and their neighbor is using, and by this means they are able 

 to draw those who formerly bought of their neighbor to buy 

 their goods, for the most of us consider it necessary to buy 

 where we can buy the clieapest._ 



It seems to us that it would be just as reasonaMe to aban- 

 don weighing one of the commodities we have mentioned as 

 it would the otlier, for, in either case, we would be putting a 

 temptation in the way of a weaker brother by giving him an 

 opportunity to cheat without fear of detection. 



It has been said in support of buying honey by the case, 

 that nearly all the retailers sell it by the section and not by 

 the weight. Let us grant this to be the fact. The sections 

 are taken out of the cases, or they are arranged in such a way 

 that the buyer can see what he is getting, if it is sold to him 

 as weighing a pound, and, if he doubts, he can ask to have it 

 weighed; if the merchant refuses to do so it would be a tacit 

 admission on his part that he was deceiving his customer. 

 Now, there are very few merchants who would take that risk, 

 for the reason the patronage of the customer would be worth 

 much more to him than the little he could make on a section 

 of honey; for how many of us would continue to trade with 

 any one whom we found deliberately trying to cheat us? 



We could cite many other reasons that to us are logical, 

 against buying or selling honey in what seems to us a very 

 primitive way, namely, of guessing at what the weights 

 might be. When nowadays scales are cheap, and busi- 

 ness is done so closely that the guess is no longer admissible, 

 if for no other reason than the ill-feeling it is liable to arise 

 between the parties buying and selling, it should be dispensed 

 with. 



Our purpose in the foregoing is to call the attention of 

 bee-keepers to this subject, especially when we find that or- 

 ganizations of bee-keepers in some instances are advocating 

 the abandoning of weighing their honey and selling it by the 

 case. Cook Co.. III. 



No. 3. APICIILTIRE AS A BUSINESS. 



A 200-Colony Basis Estimate— Capital Needed- 

 No Money in the Business Except in Hands 

 of Ppactical Apiarists. 



BY R. C. .\IKIN. 



AT last W. Z. Hutchinson has come to the decision that the 

 business that best combines with bees Is more bees. He 

 has yielded to the inevitable — to the march of siieclalism. 

 We may theorize, and plan, and prospect, but to succeed and 

 even make a respectable living from any business in these 



