THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



287 



for too many things are called by one name 

 and this makes trouble and contusion. 



White House Sta., N. J. March 1st, '92. 



Reply to Mr. Daggitt in Which are Shown 

 the Varied Sources of Honey. 



E. E. HASTY. 



S the editor decides to let the bloody 

 war go on, and I didn't say I would 

 haug up the cheese-knife, but only 

 that I was willing to do so, here goes for a 

 reply. Mr. Driggitt does not assail the cen- 

 tral part of the fort he attacks. With good 

 generalship he leads on against an outpost, 

 by way of which he hopes the work can be 

 taken. No one as yet denies that the bee is 

 a manufacturer, and not a mere gatherer, 

 but it is pointed out that the thing can be 

 split in two. It is possible to maintain that 

 part of what the bee manufactures is honey, 

 and that a part of it is not honey. Rather a 

 small hole to lead an army through ; but as 

 it appears to be the only available hole, very 

 likely the fight henceforth will mostly be 

 waged in it. These tactics necessitate the 

 admission that even wlien the bee is at work 

 on natural sources a portion of the gather- 

 ings is manufactured into, not honey, but an 

 unnamed something else. 



I wish to point out to the doughty host 

 that this is undertaking two seperate impos- 

 sibilities. The first i.'^ to change the habits 

 of speech of the entire hundred and odd mil- 

 lions that speak the English tongue. " Hon- 

 ey " is a household word. The public un- 

 derstand it to be the sweet bees store in their 

 combs when at work in a state of nature. A 

 few dozen of us bee-keepers cannot change 

 this understanding. The dictionaries them- 

 selves cannot do it. It is the province of 

 dictionaries, not to make the meaning of 

 words, but ascertain and state them. If a 

 meaning is stated wrongly, in case of a word 

 only occasionally used, a change in the lan- 

 guage may possibly result ; but in the case of 

 a household word, a wrong definition is sim- 

 ply a case of bull confronting locomotive — 

 the language keeps on as before. Now a 

 man who cuts down a bee tree, anywhere 

 from Alaska to Australia, will say, " 1 got 



thirty pounds of honey " (if that was the 

 amount.) He never was known to say, "I 

 got twenty pounds of honey, and ten pounds 

 of sweet what-is-it." Furthermore you nev- 

 er can bring al)out a state of things in which 

 any such distinction will be drawn. The 

 public are a little at sixes and sevens in 

 their minds as to whether or not it would be 

 honey if syrup were fed. This is why it is 

 needed to say " sugar-honey " — a point Mr. 

 D. wants to know about. 



As intelligent bee-keepers we surely ought 

 not to be surprised at any amount of igno- 

 rance or misinformation about bees on 

 the part of learned men. Authors did not 

 know that large amounts of natural honey 

 are stored from other sources than flowers. 

 If a dictionary should say, " Tin is a white 

 metal from Banca and Cornwall," it would 

 only show that the author didn't know, (else 

 didn't care) that there was tin iu California 

 and Dakota. Certainly it would not prove 

 that the American metal was something else 

 than tin, and that we must find a different 

 name for it. In a similar manner the defini- 

 tion " from flowers " does not compel us to 

 rule out all other honeys. 



The other impossibility is a practical one 

 in putting up honey for the market. The 

 A. B. J. leads off and many follow, in the 

 dictum that no insect honey must be mar- 

 keted. The tendency plainly is to call all 

 honey with a mean taste insect honey, and 

 all well-tasting honey floral. This is false 

 in both directions. Let us have truth. Flow- 

 ers give us all grades from the delicious 

 mangrove honey down to the hetenium honey 

 that cannot be eaten at all. Insects also 

 give us nearly all grades from a quality so 

 high that when dried it would almost pass 

 for granulated sugar down to a dirty stuff 

 repulsive both to look and taste. When the 

 bees themselves mix a fair quality of insect 

 honey with floral honey of similar quality 

 (as they no doubt do in very many cases) it 

 is practically impossible to discriminate. 

 Even if he were such a wise person, Mr. Dag- 

 gitt would not appear well explaining to his 

 customers. " This is not honey exactly, 

 neither is it exactly what-is-it. As near as I 

 can figure, it is three-fourths honey and one- 

 fourth what-is-it." 



I suspect that something like one-third 

 the entire storage of honey (and more in bad 

 seasons) never distilled inside the corolls of 

 a flower. I understand that large amounts 



