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VOL. LX— NO. 12 



HAMILTON, ILL., DECEMBER, 1920 



MONTHLY, $1.50 A YEAR 



MISSISSIPPI 



Glimpses of Beekeeping and Some Other Things in the Land of Cotton, as 



Seen by the Associate Editor 



THERE is a wonderful change 

 taking place in the South of 

 late. One having visited Mis- 

 sissippi five years ago and again now, 

 is struck by the rapid advancement. 

 Cotton is the principal money crop in 

 much of the South, and for a long 

 period the price of cotton has been 

 so low that it has hardly paid ex- 

 penses. With a good price for its 

 product the South, has developed 

 during the past few years as no 

 other section of the country has 

 done. The negro tenant has felt the 

 change, and shows it. On my previ- 

 ous visit to the cotton country, the 

 darkies were rather a dejected look- 

 ing lot. The returns from their cot- 

 ton were so small as hardly to sup- 

 ply the barest necessities, with noth- 

 ing left for luxuries. Now, on Sat- 

 urday and Sunday, one sees such 

 gorgeous silk dresses among the col- 

 ored women and silk shirts among 

 the men as vi^'ould give one the im- 

 pression that they were millionaires. 

 Many of them drive Cadillac and 

 Hudson automobiles and wear dia- 

 mond pins. Few of them have any 

 comprehension of the value of money 

 or realize that hard times may come 

 again. At Greenville, I was told of 

 an old darkey who was rather dubi- 

 ous about his annual settlement with 

 the land owner. At previous settle- 

 ments, he had usually found himself 

 in debt for money advanced during 

 the year, or, at best, with but a few 

 dollars left to call his own. Last 

 year when he presented his check at. 

 the bank he was astonished to find 

 something like $2,500 still coming to 

 him. In order to impress the old 

 darkey with the amount of his 

 wealth, the banker paid him in bills 

 of small denomination. With so 

 much money in one and two dollar 

 bills the old fellow thought he had 

 more money than he ever could use. 



On going into a store he dropped a 

 bill upon the floor. When the fact 

 was called to his attention, he re- 

 plied: "Never min' about dat, never 

 min' about dat, I got plenty mo'." 



The delta region, which extends 

 from Memphis south to Vicksburg, 

 is a stretch of wonderfully fertile 

 land. Here cotton grows to perfec- 

 tion, and one sees thousands of acres 

 of it. Greenville is in the heart of 

 the delta and apparently is a splendid 

 beekeeping territory. It has never 



The French mulberry 



been my good fortune to meet a 

 more wide-awake lot of beekeepers 

 or more interesting people than were 

 present at the Greenville meeting the 

 first week in September. Here also 

 I found some new honey plants, of 

 which I had not heard before. The 

 climbing boneset, which is men- 

 tioned elsewhere, grows abundantly 

 in the rich lands along the streams. 

 Mrs. Hill brought to the meeting a 

 bunch of goatweed, or wooly croton 

 (Croton capitatus), which she re- 

 ported as an excellent honey plant 

 for a short period of time. The 

 goatweed grows abundantly along 

 roadsides and in pastures across the 

 northern part of the State. Al- 

 though some species of croton have 

 been mentioned as the source of 

 honey in T^xas and California, I had 

 never before heard of honey from 

 any specie of croton east of the 

 Mississippi. 



One beekeeper present said that 

 although he was surrounded by cot- 

 ton fields, he did not think his bees 

 gathered any honey from it. When 

 it was stated that cotton seldom 

 yielded on sandy land, he replied that 

 probably explained it, as his immedi- 

 ate neighborhood was sandy. This 

 confirms the various reports on this 

 point from other southern regions. 

 Although white clover is generally 

 regarded as best in the North, many 

 beekeepers reported good crops from 

 clover, although not every year. 

 Button-bush, locust, persimmon, 

 chinaberry, holly, heartsease and 

 cowpeas were also regarded as im- 

 portant sources of honey there. 



That the region is very favorable 

 for bees can be seen by the fact that 

 one man present had captured 80 

 wild swarms in one season. One 

 drawback is the discrimination 

 against southern honey in the north- 

 ern markets. The explanation of 



