1920 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



415 



a desirable sort was such as to seri- 

 ously shave the profit. But if one 

 is selling honey in a retail way or 

 bottling it for a retail trade one 

 must keep up the uniformity even if 

 at a temporary shrinking of profit. 

 Some of the big bottlers have learned 

 this, while others have not. 



And that brings us to bottles and 

 bottling, a branch of the business 

 which adds materially to the cost of 

 the product and which the consumer 

 has to pay. When the price is high, 

 the consumer buys reluctantly, uses 

 sparingly and the smaller the pack- 

 age, the greater the evil. 



I am beginning to believe that the 

 worst misfortune that has come to 

 the retailing honey producer is the 

 small bottle, say one pound or less. 

 It sounds good to hear that the 

 honey is bringing 40c to 60c per 

 pound bottle. But it is not good. A 

 little honey is bought once or twice 

 by many people, and then they stop 

 and turn to some cheaper sweet and 

 seldom or never go back to honey. 

 The claim that many people are get- 

 ting a taste of honey who never had 

 it before is true as far as it goes. 

 People who have never eaten honey 

 seldom buy it. Let many such per- 

 sons have a free sample and they 

 will buy it if it is within their means, 

 but SOc honey is not within the 

 means of many people. I know, be- 

 cause I have stood in stores for hours 

 and listened and quizzed. 



From some experiences of my own 

 and of others I have Qome to the 

 conclusion that a vastly greater 

 amount of honey can be sold if put 

 out in large packages, say one to 

 five-gallon cans. Many a honey 

 lover will readily buy a 60-pound can 

 at 20c to 2Sc a pound, plus transpor- 

 tation, and then use it freely, but that 

 same person will hesitate long be- 

 fore buying anywhere near 60 pounds 

 in pound bottles. I know of one 

 producer and dealer who sells hun- 

 dreds of 60-pound cans directly to 

 consumers, often shipping the cans 

 hundreds of miles, and the same cus- 

 tomers order year after year. Do 

 you think that man would for an in- 

 stant consider bottling his honey for 

 the sake of the slight advance in 

 price? Not. much he wouldn't. 



Then there is the small producer 

 who has a few hundred or a couple 

 of thousand pounds to sell. Invari- 

 ably he turns to the pound bottle, 

 more's the pity. And these fellows 

 are seldom good merchants. While 

 motoring through the country I have 

 found many wayside stands selling 

 "honey." It makes one shudder to 

 think what some of the "stuff" of- 

 fered will do to the honey trade. 

 Sometimes very dark, oft ill-flavored. 

 more or less specks and dirt and 

 foam, poor labels or none at all, 

 sticky jars, and to cap the clima.x, 

 charging more for it than a fancy 

 article costs in city stores with free 

 delivery and goods charged. And not 

 infrequently those roadside stands 

 are anything but attractive, oft cov- 

 ered with dust, and perhaps so 

 placed that there is small chance for 



a would-be purchaser to stop his car 

 without impeding trafiic or necessi- 

 tating the crossing of the highway 

 through a stream of autos to get to 

 the stand. Pity that the roadside 

 merchants cannot travel and see 

 themselves as others see them. 



But l.oney, particularly comb honey, 

 does not lend itself to the common 

 form of roadside merchandising. 

 l-"irst, even in the best of stands, the 

 pound jar should be abandoned and 

 nothing less than a quart jar used, 

 and gallon cans should be carried. If 

 a customer wants to sample it, it 

 is easily done from a jar kept for the 

 purpose, a little of the honey being 

 poured onto a slightly salted cracker. 

 This system works very profitably, 

 altogether too profitably ofttimes, be- 

 cause the proprietor is cleaned out 

 of honey long before the roadside 

 selling season is over. 



Quality, uniformity and cleanliness 

 are indispensable, and large packages 

 are the most profitable, both imme- 

 diately and for continued trade. 



I spoke of poor labels. Some are 

 atrocious. Many of the stock sorts 

 offered by sundry concerns may be 

 good as samples of types, borders 

 and papers, but they do not add to 

 the good appearance of the honey. 

 Do not use labels with many colored 

 inks or papers. Golds and golden 

 yellows, if used sparingly, make good 

 backgrounds, and black or golden 

 brown for the lettering. Labels 

 should be proportioned to the size 

 of the package they are to be used 

 on. 



Push the sale of large packages at 

 reasonable prices. 



Rhode Island. 



MANAGEMENT TO SECURE THE 

 BIGGEST CROP 



By Frank Coverdale 

 In treating this subject, many de- 

 tails must be taken into consideration, 

 such as location, strain of bees, man- 

 agement, kind of hives, supers and 



method of wintering. Getting all col- 

 onies strong ahead of the honey flow 

 to be ready for the harvest, rather 

 than when the harvest is over, is the 

 test of good beekeeping. Bees at the 

 close of the harvest too often are only 

 boarders, who may die off before the 

 late flow. 



I have found that when a colony is 

 given an abundance of room to en- 

 large the brood nest before the har- 

 vest is ready, followed by reducing 

 the breeding area when the nectar 

 begins coming in freely, so as not to 

 allow more breeding room than is 

 necessary te maintain the colony, I se- 

 cure best results. With a hive of 

 limited capacity the beekeeper can 

 control things to his liking. Two 8- 

 franie bodies make a brood chamber 

 which is too large, while an 8-frame 

 body placed underneath a half-depth 

 set of combs will make a brood 

 chamber which will provide the aver- 

 age queen an abundance of room. 

 If these shallow supers are stored 

 away with sufficient honey, they will 

 provide stpres and breeding room to 

 build the colony to full capacity for 

 the clover harvest. When the flow 

 begins the excluder should be placed 

 above the hive-body and the shallow 

 super placed over it to receive the 

 honey. If the beekeeper runs for 

 comb honey he can set two of these 

 shallow supers of brood on a bottom 

 board beside the parent colonies, 

 moving them occasionally when the 

 bees begin working from them. They 

 can finally be doubled up in piles of 

 8 or 9 of these shallow supers, leav- 

 ing a queen in each. As the remain- 

 ing brood emerges, the combs will be 

 filled with honey in case of a good 

 flow. If desired, all the bees can be 

 jounced out, paying no attention to 

 the young queens, a method which I 

 have practiced for years. For the 

 breeding period preceding the hearts- 

 ease flow, I have found an 8-frame 

 hive to be suflicient for the needs of 

 any queens which I have ever had. 

 Feeding must be resorted to to in- 

 duce the queens to fill even that space 



Morley Pettit, founder of the beekeeping department at Ontario College of Agriculture, and 

 F. Eric Millen, present apiarist, in a Pettit outyard at Georgetown. 



