562 AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL^ 



the best of intentions. I have reference to the securing and reading of long essays 

 descriptive of bee-keeping in foreign lands. They were evidently prepared with 

 great care, and were really interesting reading, but they could have been read in 

 the bee-papers and enjoyed just as much as to have heard them read at the conven- 

 tion. We cannot afford to travel hundreds of miles to listen to what we can just as 

 well read in the papers. The only use for essays at a convention — no, I think I 

 would better modify that a little — the principal use for essays at a convention, 

 should be to provoke discussion. A long, exhaustive essay by a master hand— an 

 essay that covers every point — leaves little room for discussion, and would better be 

 printed in some periodica! instead of read in a convention, A convention should be 

 discussion— red-hot discussion— from beginning to end, and essays that tend to bring 

 about this condition are a help ; otherwise not. 



But there is such a thing as holding a convention down too closely to bee-talk. 

 The brain becomes tired, and refuses to do good work. To begin in the morning 

 and continue it until noon, then spend the whole afternoon in bee-talk, and stop for 

 supper only to begin again and keep it up until' a late hour, is too much of a good 

 thing. Then think of continuing this for three days ! There should be frequent 

 intermissions, or the introduction of music or something of this sort, and it is better 

 that it be scattered through the sessions than that one whole session be given up to 

 this sort of thing. 



Having made these criticisms, it is a pleasure to say that the St. Joseph meeting 

 was a grand success. Those western men are whole-souled and open-handed, and 

 so kind and cordial in their manners that some of them actually persuaded their 

 wives to come with them ! After the long essays had been read, and the question- 

 box was opened, the convention also seemed to " open up," and there was a lively 

 discussion. 



Feeding Back Honey.—" What valuable facts were brought to the surface ?" 

 That is what the non-attendant wants to know. Now let each person who was 

 present be honest with himself, and go carefully over the points that he learned at 

 the convention, and see how many he can count up. Those who are not readers of 

 the bee-papers may find quite a number ; otherwise I think it will puzzle some of 

 them to say what they learned. I have put myself to this test, and I can remember 

 just one thing, and that made me prick up my ears and go over and sit down by Mr. 

 C. F. Lane, of Lexington, Mo.; also to quiz him still further at the hotel. The 

 question of the profitableness of feeding back honey to complete unfinished sections 

 came up, and Mr. Lane said that he made it pay, and he succeeded by putting one 

 or two colonies in a tent, piling supers of unfinished sections on top of the hives to 

 the height of eight or ten supers to the hive. He then brought in weak colonies, or 

 those liaving poor queens, or those that for any cause he did not consider very 

 desirable colonies for wintering, and united the bees with the colonies over which 

 the sections had been piled. This course filled the hives and the cases of sections 

 "jam full " of bees. 



To feed the bees, he simply took unfinished combs of honey, uncapped the honey 

 that was capped, and stood the combs up around the hives, and the bees came out 

 and carried in the honey and finished up the sections. Of course it is not necessary 

 to use unfinished combs for feeding purposes, any kind of combs will answer, but one 

 would naturally use such if there were any, in preference to using full combs. 



Mr. Lane also said that after the bees had been in the tent a few days, they 

 could be fed from a feeder placed at the opposite end of the tent. They would fly 

 out and visit the feeder, load up, and then return all right. His tent is 40x20 feet 

 in size. He admitted what I can readily believe is true, viz.: that there are quite a 



