140 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



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W. F. CLARKE, Editor. 



CHICAGO, JUNE, 1874. ' 



What is Honey? 



Gen. D. L. Adair is reported to have said 

 at the North American Bee-Keepers' Con- 

 vention : " Strictly speaking, there is no 

 distinct substance that can be called honey. 

 The bees gather from flowers, from the 

 diff'erent sweets known as honey dews, and 

 from the saccharine juice of fruits and 

 plants, substances that consist chiefly of 

 sugar in some forms, mixed with other 

 secretions and essential oils, and store it in 

 the comb cells, and it is called honey. It 

 necessarily varies widely, depending on the 

 source from which it is derived. All honey 

 is sugar containing vegetable substances in 

 solution with it. Sugar in all three of its 

 forms is, in a general sense, the sweet prin- 

 ciple of plants, fruits and trees. Cane- 

 sugar, fruit-sugar and what is known as 

 grape-sugar, vary but slightly in their con- 

 stituent elements, and can be chemically 

 converted into each other. They dift'er 

 only in the proportion of hydrogen and 

 oxygen, or the element of water. Bees 

 will gather and store up anything that sugar 

 in any of its forms are mixed with, so as 

 to give a decided sweet taste ; and while it 

 may be true that in the process of gather- 

 ing and transferring to the hive, no chem- 

 ical change takes place, they mechanically 

 change its taste by its absorbing the scent 

 peculiar to the hive, and often change its 

 consistency by a process of evaporations of 

 any excess of water." 



Gen. Adair is a very scientific and suc- 

 cessful apiarian, and we can usually en- 

 dorse his views to the full. But he is oc- 

 casionally hyper-philosophical, and pushes 

 science too far. It may be qui^e true that 

 sugar is the basis of all sweets, honey in- 

 cluded, but it is convenient, to say the least 

 to have distinctive terms for the var- 

 ious saccharine substances, though the one 

 luscious principle pervades them all. Only 

 confusion of ideas can come to the popular 



mind, by forcing too much philosophical 

 accuracy into common modes of speech. 

 Thus, we call one form of sweet, molasses; 

 another, syrup; and still a third, honey. 

 What is the good of arguing that there is 

 no distinct substance that can be called 

 molasses ? It is the popular and commer- 

 cial name of a liquid sweet obtained from 

 the West Indies, having a peculiar flavor, 

 and capable of being distilled into rum. 

 Yet we all know that its main constituent 

 's sugar, or the saccharine principle. So of 

 honey. It is a liquid sweet, gathered from 

 a thousand flowers, acted on in some pecu- 

 liar way by the honey-gatherers, and poss- 

 essing a flavor and properties peculiar to 

 itself. But mankind were pretty well 

 aware, before Gen. Adair delivered his phil- 

 osophical disquisition, that honey was 

 mainly composed of sugar. 



There is a question as yet unsettled 

 among scientific bee-keepers, to which Gen. 

 Adair seems to give the go-by altogether. 

 He says, "It may be true that in the pro- 

 cess of gathering and transferring to the 

 hive, no chemical change takes place " in 

 the sugary stores collected by the bees. On 

 the other hand, it may be true, as many 

 suppose, that a chemical change does take 

 place, and that the formic acid in the body 

 of the bee so acts on the gathered sweet as 

 to transform it essentially. There may be 

 more than an influence mechanically ex- 

 erted by the odor of the hive. Each hive 

 is generally considered to have its peculiar 

 scent, and hence in joining swarms or in- 

 troducing new queens, it is good policy to 

 introduce smoke or some perfume to con- 

 found the bees for a time, until the new 

 colonists or newly-introduced queen come 

 to smell like the rest. But honey, if gath- 

 ered from the same flower, is all alike, no 

 matter in what hive it is stored. At any 

 rate, human senses cannot detect any difter- 

 ence. It is therefore quite as probable that 

 the change is chemical, as that it is merely 

 mechanical. On the whole, we are in- 

 clined to think that the great majority of 

 people will persist in believing that there 

 is such a thing as honey. If they should 

 come to a ditt'erent opinion, and conclude 

 that it is mere sugar, "only that and noth- 

 ing more," we fear it will spoil bee-keep- 

 ing, and that it will no longer be possible 



