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Xhe \%'iley l^ie Altoiit Honey. 



In the Pojndar Science Monthly for May, 

 we find a very interesting article from 

 Allen Priugle, o£ Selby, Ont., replying to 

 the celebrated Wiley lie in the very periodi- 

 cal which first gave that monstrous false- 

 hood to the World. Millions of copies of 

 the Wiley fabrication have been made by 

 other periodicals— every one of which 

 should now be glad to publish the refutation 

 — that is, if they desire to be honest ! 



On account of the interest which bee- 

 keepers have in the thorough contradiction 

 of that diabolical deception of Wiley, given 

 in tlie Popular Science Monthly 9 years 

 ago, we will copy Mr. Pringle's article in 

 its entirety. Here it is : 



Artificial Honey & Manufactureil Science, 



By ALLEN PRINGLE, 

 President of the Ontarw Bee-Keepers' Association. 



We are told that this is a scientific age, 

 and the statement is undoubtedly true. The 

 world now more than ever before looks to 

 science as a secular if not a spiritual guide. 

 However much their speculations may be 

 questioned and controverted, the scientific 

 book and the scientific man are popularly 

 accepted as authority, at least on matters 

 of physical and historical fact. The veracity 

 of science, therefore, is, or ought to be. 

 above suspicion. 



How careful, then, ought the teacher and 

 exponent of science to be that his asser- 

 tions are true; that his alleged facts are 

 facts; and that even his speculations are 

 free from the appearance of dogmatism ! 

 He needs to be especially particular when 

 writing tor the general public, for people 

 untrained in science will accept his state- 

 ments as expert testimony. Errors will 

 thus be sure to mislead his readers, many 

 of whom are without the knowledge that 

 would enable them to discriminate between 

 the true and the false in his assertions. 



In the Popular Science Monthly for 

 June, 1881, appeared an article on 

 " Glucose and Grape Sugar," by Prof. H. 

 W. Wiley. In that article the following 

 unfortunate statement was made; "In 

 commercial honey, which is entirely free 

 from bee-mediation, the comb is made of 

 paraftine, and filled with pure glucose by 

 appropriate machinery." To say that there 

 was not one word of truth in that extraor- 

 dinai-y assertion is the short and proper 

 way to put it, and that is exactly what I 

 untlertake to say. There was not a tittle 

 of evidence that any such honey had ever 

 been made, up to that time, nor is there a 

 particle of evidence that any such honey 

 has since been made. 



Nevertheless, this vile slander on an hon- 

 est and honorable industry has done incal- 

 culable injury to bee culture in America, 

 if not throughout the world. A lie is said 

 to travel half round the world while tbo 

 truth is getting ready to start, and this one 

 proved no exception. Though contradicted 

 and refuted over and over again, it still 

 lives and is still going. Newspapers still 

 keep iterating and reiterating Prof. Wiley's 

 slander, but they seldom publish a correc- 

 tion. 



Thousands of people, common and un- 

 common, still believe that scientific yarn 

 that comb honey is manufactured through- 



out without "bee mediation," and why 

 should they not i The former believe it 

 because the newspapers say so, and the 

 latter because the magazines and enc5'clo- 

 psedias say so ; for it is a fact that this 

 itinerant fiction has actually found a place 

 in the American Cyclopiedia, and the 

 American Supplement to the Encyclopedia 

 Britannica. In Justice to the latter, how- 

 ever, it must be said that the British work, 

 whose publishers repudiate the American 

 Supplement, contains nothing of this. 



Here is what the American Cyclopaedia 

 says on the subject: " Glucose is very ex- 

 tensively fed to bees, which eat it with 

 great avidity, and store it away unchanged 

 as honey. It is also put up directly in 

 trade as honey — with which bees have had 

 nothing to do- being put by means of 

 appropriate machinery into artificial 

 combs made of paraSine" (page 834, Vol. 

 VIII, edition of 1883). 



The American Supplement to the Ency- 

 clopaedia Britannica has this information 

 on the subject : " Honey is manufactured 

 on the same plan, only here the bees are 

 employed to assist in the fraud. They are 

 furnished with a supply of starch sugar, 

 which they store in their combs, when 

 these combs are also fraudulent, being 

 made from parafiine and furnished to the 

 bees, who fill them with glucose and cai* 

 them with genuine wax. It is difficult to 

 see how the art of adulteration could be 

 carried further" (page 41, Vol. I, Hubbard 

 Brothers, Philadelphia and New York, 

 1885). 



Argument and refutation failing to kill 

 the falsehood, the editor of Olenningf: in 

 Bee-Cultnre — a responsible man financially 

 — offered a reward of $1,000 to any one 

 (including Prof. Wiley) who would produce 

 some of the so-called " mauufactured " 

 honey, or designate the place where it was 

 made or could be found. This offer is still 

 open and good. The writer of this article 

 also offered through the press a reward of 

 100 colonies of bees (equal to about $1,000) 

 to any one who would produce some of this 

 " artificial honey. " This offer also is still 

 open and good. None, however, has ever 

 been produced. No one has yet come for- 

 ward to claim the cash or the bees. 



Prof. Wiley had supplemented the asser- 

 tion above quoted with the following addi- 

 tional information, probably to encourage 

 the manufacturers: "This honey" (that 

 is, the manufactured article) "for white- 

 ness and beauty rivals the celebrated real 

 white-clover honey of Vermont, but can be 

 sold at an immense profit at one-half the 

 price." Now, had that business of honey- 

 manufacture been as practical as profitable, 

 the temptation to eml)ark in it would have 

 been almost too much for human nature to 

 resist. But it seems nobody went in, while 

 nearly everybody believed that other 

 bodies were in. 



However, Nature's dearth is likely to 

 produce conviction where facts, arguments, 

 and rewards failed to do so. The seasons 

 of 1887 and 1888, especially the latter, 

 were unpropitious for the " little busy bee," 

 and yielded but little honey. The crop was 

 a general failure, not only in America but 

 in Europe. The modicum of honey pro- 

 duced, especially of comb honey, was soon 

 exhausted, and the dealers as well as con- 

 sumers. North, South, East and West, 

 were crying out for honey. 



The producers were inundated with 

 letters and orders which they could not fill. 

 Now, here was the grand opportunity for 

 the manufacturers of " artificial honey." If 

 the article could lie sold "at an immense 

 profit at half the price " of the genuine 

 article, as Prof. Wiley assures us, these 

 bogus manufacturers could have coined 

 money — there were " millions in it " appar- 

 ently. But they failed to appear. The 



glucose was available, the paraffine ditto, 

 and the " appropriate machinery " ought, 

 in the interval under the law of progress, 

 to have become still more "appropriate" 

 and perfect in its work ; but, strange to say, 

 the famine of honey continued. 



The tempting prices were offered in vain. 

 Not a pound of the stuff ever "material- 

 ized," so far as anybody could find out. 

 Nor was this gap in the extracted honey 

 caused by the drouth, filled by any artificial 

 substitute, which also goes to prove that 

 the prevalent notion that honey is exten- 

 sively adulterated has very little founda- 

 tion in fact. Considering the compara- 

 tively low market prices of honey the past 

 few years, and the facility with which the 

 genuine article can be produced in modern 

 scientific bee-culture, adulteration would 

 hardly pay for the trouble. 



That there is but very little adulteration, 

 either of comb or extracted honey, may 

 be safely asserted. The prevalent popular 

 lielief to the contrary may be accounted for 

 in two ways — by the prevalent ignorance 

 of the character, and what I might call 

 " the habits of honey," and by the erro- 

 neous teachings and misleading reports of 

 the authorities under review 



While it may be said, in general terms, 

 that honey chemically consists of sugar and 

 water, in the proportion usually of about 75 

 per cent, of the former to 25 of the latter, 

 these elements vary so much in their pro- 

 portions in different grades of honey, gath- 

 ered from so many different fiowers at 

 different seapons of the year, that there is 

 no sure test, chemical or other, of honey. 



Even the polariscope, but recently con- 

 sidered a certain test of its purity, and still 

 so considered by some analysts, is found to 

 be uncertain and unreliable. While gen- 

 erally in pure honej' the ray of light is 

 turned to the left, some samples, equally 

 pure, though perhaps stored rapidly and 

 capped prematurely, may contain so much 

 cane sugar tbat the ray is turned to the 

 right. Hence the mistakes of chemists, 

 relying upon the integrity of the polari- 

 scope, in passing upon the purity and im- 

 purity of honey. They have pronounced 

 samples adulterated which were known to 

 be the pure products of the flowers gath- 

 ered by the bees. 



Every apiarian specialist knows that dur- 

 ing the course of one good honey season, 

 beginning with the early spring bloom of 

 willow, maple, fruit, etc., and ending with 

 the fall bloom of golden-rod, buckwheat, 

 etc., he can get nearly a dozen different 

 grades or kinds of honey — in color from the 

 very light, almost transparent linden, to 

 the turgid and black buckwheat, and in 

 flavor from the mild and delicious sweet to 

 that which is strong, rank, and quite un- 

 palatable to some tastes. Let a person 

 with no special knowledge of honey be 

 presented with the former for his sight and 

 palate, and then with the latter, and, ten 

 to one, he will declare that the one sample 

 is not honey at all, but a vile imitation. 



Then, again, good, pure honey, through 

 mismanagement, may become so deterior- 

 ated in quality and altered in taste as to 

 at once provoke suspicion of adulteration. 



Onmiilation was also regarded as a sure 

 test of the purity of honey, but it is not so, 

 as some pure grades, containing only the 

 non-crystallized sugar, will not granulate ; 

 while other samples mixed with glucose 

 will granulate. The light-colored and best 

 grades of honey will be finegrained in 

 granulation, while other grades will be 

 coarse-grained, and present the appear- 

 ance of sugar for certain to the uninitiated. 



When an honest man falls into an error, 

 he is always willing to correct it as soon as 

 it is pointed out to him and proved to be 

 such. Prof. Wiley was expected to do that 

 much at least toward repairing the injury 



