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AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



June 



up in a formal letter to the beekeepers 

 of the United States. Tired but satis- 

 fied with the day's work, the men piled 

 three deep into the two automobiles at 

 the door, and were taken to Dr. Phil- 

 lips' home for dinner. 



Did you ever see and hear ten or 

 twelve bee-men together at a meal? 

 They ate honey of course, beautiful 

 little individual packages of it, the gift 

 of the producer, and they weightily 

 considered its flavor with as much 

 gravity as they had used on the war 

 program. Snatches of their conversa- 

 tion overheard ranged from liberty 

 and independence to garden crops and 

 soda water! Here Mr. Demuth was 

 describing the " true democracy "found 

 in the beehive, "where noone is boss — 

 absolutely noone" — and wistfully he 

 wished that men might learn wisdom 

 from the bee. At one end of the table 

 Prof. Jager was talking of Arlington 

 Cemetery with its rows of unknown 

 dead. 



"Ah! Liberty, Liberty!" he said 

 sadly, " What a price to pay ! And yet 

 —we are willing to pay anything — any- 

 thing for it! We must help the little 

 countries to their freedom!" He spoke 

 feelingly for, a Southern Slav himself, 

 he knows well the iron heel of oppres- 

 sion. 



At another table, Mr. Bacon was dis- 

 cussing the psychology of faces, and the 

 necessity for salesmen to be able to 

 read faces. 



"Talking to some men, who look 

 you coldly in the eye without a change 

 of expression, is like addressing a 

 stone wall " 



" Yes, I eat a half pound of honey 

 every day," says Dr. Jones from an- 

 other quarter, " and everybody would 

 be the better for doing likewise." 



" I have a few new pieces of pottery^ 



fine specimens — that I picked up in " 



and Dr. Gates is off on his hobby; 



the relentless and indomitable Dr. Phil- 

 lips led them back to the office to work 

 until late thit night. 



The next day saw them scattered in 

 committees of two or three, determined 

 to achieve concrete results. One group 

 spent the day at the office of the Secre- 

 tary of Agriculture, asking for in- 

 creased funds for the Bureau of Ento- 

 mology for the war propaganda. An- 

 other waited upon the National Defence 

 Council with regard to the transporta- 

 tion of containers, while still another 

 went to the Post-office to see about the 

 shipping of bees by mail. That night 

 the groups dissolved, and most of the 

 men left Washington. 



It may seem like a little thing — this 

 gathering of a dozen men, but it was of 

 no small moment to the beekeepers of 

 the country. Those few but determined 

 minds have put into motion an impulse 

 that will go on with increasing power 

 long after the war is over, so that api- 

 culture may rapidly take her rightful 

 place among the agricultural industries 

 of the United States. The time may 

 not be far distant when honey will be 

 on every table, and more beekeepers 

 will count their hives by thousands! 



Dr. a C. Baxter, of Illinois 



while Mr. Root dilates upon the charm 

 of life in winter in Florida. 



So the war conference relaxed and 

 enjoyed it§e|f until 7:00 o'clock, when 



Honey— Compared With Other 



Sweets 



BY A. C. BA.XTER, M. D. 



IT is a fault of man to praise highly 

 anything in which he is interested, 

 the beekeeper being no exception 

 to the rule. He is fond of praising his 

 honey as a food and a "cure all" for 

 the diseases to which the human body 

 is heir. He does not praise the honey 

 with the idea to mislead or deceive, 

 but from lack of knowledge of what 

 honey really is. When he tells of the 

 medical value of honey he bases his 

 opinion on what he really thinks has 

 taken place, as he has used it in various 

 ailments, and being still able to tell the 

 tale, he believes honey the agent that 

 restored his health. When the facts of 

 the matter are carefully looked into it 

 is discovered that probably he would 

 have been well in a few days without 

 any treatment. 



Another common fault is to explain 

 to the housewife the food value of 

 honey and compare its value with some 

 common article of diet. For example: 

 that seven ounces of honey is equal to 

 a quart of milk. True it is, but the 

 good housewife doesn't believe it, and 

 at any rate you couldn't expect her to 

 replace milk with honey. On the other 

 hand if she learns that strawberries or 

 peaches have a better flavor with honey 

 or that bread and cakes made with 

 honey keep better, not drying out as 

 when made with sugar, she is at once 

 interested and will get some honey to 

 see whether the story is true. 



It is as an article of diet that honey 

 must be known, if it is ever expected 

 to become more than a luxury or a 

 sweet to please the children, an article 

 that surpasses all other sugars in the 

 diet of mankind. To understand this 

 it might be well to explain what honey 

 is and the digestion of the various 

 sugars. The chemist tells us that honey 

 contains approximately 40 percent lev- 

 ulose, 33 percent dextrose, and lyi per- 

 cent saccharose, the rest being mois- 

 ture, a small amount of mineral, color- 

 ing matter and dextrine (vegetable 



gum). This percentage of sugar varies 

 with the nature of the nectar and age 

 of the honey. In old and well ripened 

 honey saccharose (cane sugar) is con- 

 verted by a ferment present in all 

 honeys into levulose and dextrose. 



Honey, therefore, consists of two 

 principal sugars, levulose (fructose) 

 and dextrose (grape sugar). These 

 sugars derive their names from their 

 action on a ray of polarized light, their 

 chemical formula being the same. 

 Levulose in solution turns the ray of 

 light to the left, it being levorotatory 

 or as its name indicates, is a " left 

 handed " sugar. Dextrose, on the other 

 hand, turns the ray of light to the right, 

 being dextrorotatory, and is therefore 

 a "right handed" sugar. The predomi- 

 nating sugar in honey is levulose, it 

 being the sugar that gives honey its 

 high food value. All sugars are digest- 

 ed and assimilated in the small intes- 

 tine. Saccharose (cane sugar) is split 

 by an intestinal ferment, in equal parts 

 of levulose and dextrose, and is then 

 absorbed, while honey already contain- 

 ing these sugars does not have to be 

 acted upon by a ferment, and can be 

 assimilated by any one, even if the fer- 

 ments are absent. Levulose is very 

 readily absorbed in the intestinal tract, 

 while dextrose without the presence of 

 levulose is very slowly absorbed. In 

 some manner the "left handed" sugar 

 in its passage through the intestinal 

 walls, pulls along the "right handed " 

 sugar. 



■The glucose of commerce, known 

 in America as corn syrup, must be re- 

 garded as a mixture of dextrose, mal- 

 tose and dextrine, and is prepared by 

 hydrolysing starch, by boiling with a 

 dilute mineral acid. After the acid is 

 removed and the solution clarified, the 

 liquid is concentrated in vacuum pans 

 to the density of syrup. A small quan- 

 tity of solution of sodium bisulphite is 

 added to bleach it to prevent fermen- 

 tation and to inhibit browning. The 

 maltose of this mixture must be acted 

 upon by a ferment before it can be 

 used by the body, and then it forms 

 more dextrose. So it is easy to see 

 that an individual who uses this syrup 

 is receiving very little food value for 

 his money. The only thing accom- 

 plished is the softening of a little dry 

 bread. So with all of man's methods, 

 Nature's sugar — honey — still continues 

 to be the best sweet for man. 

 Springfield, 111. 



The Work of the Bee Division 

 of the Dominion Experi- 

 mental Farms 



BY F. W. L. SLADEN, APIARIST, DOMINION 

 E.XPERIMENTAL FARMS 



IN organizing the work of the Bee 

 Division of the Dominion Experi- 

 mental Farms, my endeavor has 

 been to develop work of practical util- 

 ity to beekeepers on the lines that have 

 been laid down and successfully fol- 

 lowed by the other divisions of the 

 Experimental Farms' service. The 

 Experimental Fyms' system conducts 

 researches and experiments to test the 

 value, for all purposes, of all kinds of 

 stock and plants and their adaptability 

 to the varied climatic and other condi- 

 tions which prevail in the several prov- 

 inces. The investigations of the parli- 



