544 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



July 



Sunday, June 9. Our stenographer suggests 

 that, if they must tell lies, they do it on 

 some other day than Sunday. Read : 



The worst eaemy of the honey-raiser is the pro- 

 ducer of artificial an<l adulterated honey. It is 

 easy to adulterate honey, but only recently have 

 men become ingenious and skillful enough to make 

 honey in the comb, both the honey and the comb 

 being artificially produced. The spurious product 

 looks almost exactly like that created by bees, and 

 it is put up in the little square boxes, with window- 

 ed sides, like those used in hives. It is possible to 

 detect the imitation, only by tasting it, by which 

 test anybody who has a tooth for genuine honey 

 can easily detect the fraud. The counterfeit is so 

 skillfully executed, however, that it frequently de- 

 ceives a novice. A New Fork man in a restaurant 

 in this city the other night called for honey in the 

 comb, and five boxes were purchased for him at as 

 many different groceries before one of genuine 

 honey was obtained. He then described the meth- 

 od of artificial honey-making, and in conclusion 

 said that he was a drummer for a New York honey 

 house. 



Will the Sun people be kind enough to 

 contradict the false statement they have 

 probably unconsciously made in regard to 

 their neighbors? We also send them one of 

 our reward cards. 



THE SAME OLD FALSEHOOD IN OTHER SHEEP'S 

 CLOTHING. 



The inclosed clipping was taken from the Evening 

 News, Chicago, of May 251, 1889. Ed Hile. 



Muskegon, Mich., June 3, 1889. 



MANUFACTURED HONEY; HOW ONE (W NATURE'S 

 PRODUCTS IS SUCCESSFULLY COUNTERFEITED. 



It is very likely the desire to be too quickly rich 

 that makes the grocer sand his sugar, and the 

 apothecary trifle with his life-saving drugs, and the 

 weaver put cotton with his wool and starch with 

 his cotton; but it hardly makes much difference to 

 the consumer, those that suffer in consequence, 

 what is the occasion of the act; it is enough for 

 him, and considerably more than enough, that it is 

 done. Yet when he finds the sediment of sand at 

 the bottom of his coffee-cup he is glad it is there 

 rather than down his throat; and he knows that if 

 the apothecary has made the curative medicine too 

 weak he has also diminished the power of the poi- 

 sonous; and in general, fancying himself beyond 

 the possibility of reaching or remedying the evil, 

 he goes on submitting to it, thanks goodness it is 

 no worse, that the air of heaven is licensed to no 

 6hop-keeper, and one has not yet succeeded in 

 patenting the essential element of fire, so that he 

 may breathe and keep warm without fear of adul- 

 Drration. Two or three things besides, he has flat- 

 tered himself, were beyond the coveting hand of 

 greed; among them the egg, for instance, and the 

 bee with that geometrical work of his which has 

 for ages been doing all sorts of things with the 

 brains of philosophers. Lately he has heard some 

 dreadful suspicions as to the possibility of counter- 

 feiting of the egg, but he dismissed them as ab- 

 surdities. But when he heard that the honey-men 

 bought glucose and set down a mass of it before 

 their bee-hives, the bees at once accepted the bene- 

 faction, glad at heart to find their food close at 

 hand, without the trouble of blundering about gar- 

 dens and into blossoms, and no long flights to take 

 on weary wings; he felt that at any rate it passed 

 through the mechanism of the bee and got the 

 tang and taste of honey, if it were not the expressed 

 flower essence at first hand. But recently, says 

 Harper's Bazar, he has received a shock in which 

 the walla of his last stronghold have crumbled. 

 There are new adulterators, if you will call them 

 so, counterfeiters, what you will, who prepare arti- 

 ficial combs from paraffine as geometrical in shape, 

 as waxy in appearance, and who fill these combs 

 with clear syrup and seal them, so that apparently 

 not even the bee could tell the difference between 

 the false and the true. He sees with horror that 

 the article sacred to sunshine and summer and po- 

 etry, to the Bible land flowing with milk and honey, 

 to Sordello's song of Elys, is vanishing from the 

 market and the table; and unless a man keepg his. 



own bees he may doubt if he is eating any thing 

 but strained-glucose syrup at the time when he 

 would like to be indulging in all sorts of fine and 

 flowery fancies concerning his honey in the honey- 

 comb. 



And so it seems that even Harper's Bazar 

 has gone into the enemy's ranks, and taking 

 to bearing false witness against their neigh- 

 bor. If any of our readers can tell us what 

 issue of the Bazar contained the matter re- 

 ferred to in the above, we shall esteem it a 

 favor. 



FROM DIFFERENT FIELDS, 



ORANGE BLOSSOM HONEY NOT A MYTH; O. O. POP- 

 PLETON'S STATEMENT CHALLENGED. 



T DID not know until recently, that there was 

 my any question as to orange-blossoms yielding 

 W honey. I have been in Florida five years, and 

 "*■ have taken more or less surplus honey from 

 that source every year; and if my bees had 

 not been so weakened by moving from Wisconsin I 

 could have taken it by the ton the first year; for a 

 blossom, when shaken over the hand, would deposit 

 a good-sized drop; and my bees, although mere nu- 

 clei, and too few in numbers to work in upper sto- 

 ries, filled their brood-combs to the exclusion of 

 brood. I have this season taken 1000 pounds in one- 

 pound sections, and 200 in broken honey. Most of 

 the former I sent to Hildreth Bros., of New York, 

 who sold it at 14 V 2 and 15 cents per pound— not a 

 fancy price, to be sure, but as high as white clover 

 in the same market, to which it is in no way inferi- 

 or; for its flavor (although different, of course) is as 

 good and wears as well, while it is fully as white in 

 color. I had 33 stocks in the apiary, and have 63 

 now. A friend of mine in a town near by reports 

 having taken 100 pounds in sections from a swarm 

 that issued in March. 



After five and a half years continuous residence 

 in Florida my family and self will this summer re- 

 visit the scenes of our childhood in Southern Wis- 

 consin, where we hope to spend two months with 

 old friends and neighbors. J. L. Wolfenden. 



Evanston, Fla., June 10, 1889. 



THE VALUE OF SALT, SOOT, LIME, ETC., ON LAND. 



We had a pasture once, and nothing would cat the 

 grass. We sowed about 600 lbs. of salt per acre on 

 it. In a short time, both sheep and cows took it 

 and ate it bare, after which a good grass came up. 

 Salt is a good fertilizer on light laud that is apt to 

 burn up; so is lime or both mixed. Lime is a good 

 fertilizer on land that grows much wheat or white 

 straw of any kind, especially if it is deficient in the 

 soil; 25 to 30 tons per acre has a marked and per- 

 manent effect. Soot is a valuable manure. There 

 is a great deal used in England. The chimney- 

 sweeps save all they get, and sell it to the farmers. 

 Once I was going to put soot on a field that I 

 thought needed lime, and I had both mixed in a 

 room in the barn. The ammonia set free was too 

 strong to make it pleasant staying in the room. 

 After that I never mixed them, for ammonia is 

 very volatile, and I concluded all that was set free 

 was lost. When I first noticed the effect of soot as 

 a manure, I asked the knowing ones where its 

 manurial value Jay, and I was told that it had no 



