1921 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



59 



The cause: People arojnd here sold 

 as low as 20 cents a pound, for both 

 comb and extracted, and one man 

 sold S-p'Ound pails, by express, 

 charges prepaid, at $1.40 each. 

 He that hath plenty of good Home 

 Brew, 



And giveth his neighbor none. 

 Shan't have any of my Home Brew 



When his Home Brew is gone. 

 O! won't it be joyful, joyful, joyful, 



0, won't it be joyful, 

 When his Home Brew is gone? 



And won't it be joyful when the 

 price cutters are out of honey, for 

 then we shall get fair prices. In the 

 meantime, the Producers' League 

 shall have made a start, and condi- 

 tions will gradually improve. 



1, for one, am inclined t'o withdraw 

 my help from the back-yard, barn- 

 yard beekeeper, the one who has bees 

 this year, none the ne.xt, who is the 

 cause of the big half of the foulbrood 

 in 'the country, who buys no books 

 and reads no journals, joins no asso- 

 ciations and dumps 50 to 5,000 pounds 

 of honey on the market at less than 

 wholesale. The man who wants to 

 start in beekeeping, as a vocation or 

 avocation I shall help all I can; I 

 mean the man, wherever he is, who 

 wants to keep bees, a few colonies or 

 many, year after year. 



Iowa. 



SPECIFIC GRAVITY OF HONEY 



By F. Dundas Todd 



The editor suggests that many 

 readers would probably like t'o know 

 what is meant by specific gravity, 

 how it is measured, and what advan- 

 tage it will be to a beekeeper to 

 know the specific gravity of his 

 honey. 



This runs along the line of prog- 

 ress, for in these days of exact meas- 

 urements the time is coming when 

 big buyers of honey will pay tor it on 

 the basis of its sugar co'ntent as defi- 

 nitely ascertained, not as guessed at 

 in the present system, whereby a jar 

 is tilted and honey is roughly classi- 

 fied as thick or thin according as the 

 air-cell rises slowly or quickly. Some 

 years ago, when a big baking con- 

 cern bought honey by the carload, 

 their chemist stated that all honey 

 bought by the firm was tested for 

 sugar content and paid for accord- 

 ingly. It was the same in the re- 

 cent "wet" period, all alcoholic bev- 

 erages were tested for alcoholic con- 

 tent, and the amount of that was 

 the basis on which price was calcu- 

 lated. The amount of water present 

 was not considered at all, but flavor 

 was an important factor, just as it 

 is in honey, cheese and many other 

 foods. 



In the United States Pharmaco- 

 paeia, the authoritative book for all 

 druggists in the United States, honey 

 is defined as having a minimum spe- 

 cific gravity of 1.37, while the Cana- 

 dian minimum legal standard is 75 

 per cent solids, or a specific gravity 

 of 1.3790. For export abroad, as I 

 pointed out in the American Bee 

 Journal of May, 1920, the New Zea- 

 land Government honey graders re- 



fuse all honey with a specific gravity 

 of less than 1.420, which is about 82 

 per cent solids. New Zealand honey 

 as sold abroad has 10 per cent more 

 sugar content than honey of the 

 minimum legal standard on the North 

 American continent, and ought to be 

 worth just that much more monoj'. 

 I have judged many hundreds of 

 samples of honey at exhibitions, and 

 found them range turn 75 to 84.6 per 

 cent solids, a difference of almost 13 

 per cent between the two extremes, 

 yet all producers expected to sell 

 their honey at the same price, whi^n 

 as a matter of actual value the best 

 was worth 3c a pound more than the 

 poorest at prevailing wnolesai; 

 prices. When the facts were plainly 

 stated to the betkeeper who had pro- 

 duced the thick honey he at once saw 

 the point, and used the data as a 

 selling argument with so much efifecl 

 that he got two cents a pound more 

 for his crop than he had previously 

 been asking, no small item on a total 

 output of 6,000 pounds, being an ac- 

 tual gain of $180. 



The specific gravity of a substance 

 is simply the ratio of its weight to 

 that of the same bulk of water. For 

 instance, a cubic foot of water weighs 

 1,000 ounces, a cubic foot of brass 

 8,000 ounces — that is, it is eight times 

 heavier than water, therefore its 

 specific gravity is 8. A cubic foot of 

 alcohol weighs 790 ounces, milk 1,030 

 ounces, glycerin 1,260 ounces, hence 

 their specific gravities are .790, 1.03 

 and 1.260 respectively. It is merely 

 the old story of adopting some one 

 thi'Ug as a standard by which to 

 measure a certain quality of every- 

 thing else. We simply cannot 

 measure a thing by itself, the note- 

 worthy example of this absurdity is 

 when we try to measure all minds by 

 one, that is our own mind. If we 

 could only, devise some means of 



F. Dundas Todd 



measuring a miiiv. by something else 

 we would unhappily realize the ful- 

 fillment of Burns' prayer: 

 "O wad some Power the giftie gie us 

 To see oursels as ithers see us 1" 



But it looks as if for all time we 

 will be in the ridiculous position of 

 being able to define insanity, but not 

 sanity, that is: the negative condition 

 but not the positive. 



To weigh a cubic foot of any one 

 thing would be quite a task, for the 

 first problem woull be to get a block 

 of the substance exa.tly one cubic 

 foot in bulk, an almost impossible 

 undertaking. So in practice, as far 

 as fluids are concerned, a rather sim- 

 ple method has been devised based 

 on the fact that in the case of an 

 object lighter than water, one that 

 will float, the amount of water, it dis- 

 places will be exactly of the same 

 weight as the object. For example, if 

 we take a block of oak one inch 

 square and 14 inches long, that is of 

 14 cubic inches capacity, and dip it 

 in a vessel containing waier, we -find 

 it will sink to a certai depth, dis- 

 placing some water, and raising the 

 water level until the weight of water 

 displaced is exactly equal' to that of 

 the wood it buoys up. Now if we 

 guide the wood to a perfectly upright 

 position, we will find that it will 

 sink to about 10 inches in the water, 

 and has therefore displaced 10 cubic 

 inches of the fluid. Therefore we 

 find that 10 cubic inches of water are 

 equal in weight to 14 cubic inches of 

 oak. The latter then is, cubic inch 

 by cubic inch, or cubic foot by cubic 

 foot, just ten-fourteenths !of the 

 weight of watei, or expressed in the 

 regular form of a decimal fraction, 10 

 divided by 14 is equal to .714, the spe- 

 cific gravity of oak. 



Our oak stick can now be used as 

 a measuring rod for a great many 

 other liquids. For instance, we may 

 have a strong solution of salt in 

 water, brine in fact, so we dip our 

 oak stick in it and find it will sink 

 only 9 inches. So 9 cubic inches of 

 brine equal the weight of the stick, 

 but so did 10 cubic inches of pure 

 water, hence 9 cubic inches of brine 

 and 10 inches of pure are equal in 

 weight to each other. We might say 

 that brine is 10-9ths, or 1 and l-9th 

 times the weight of pure water; that 

 is, its specific gravity is l.H. We 

 could try the same experiment on 

 honey, say a sample of well ripened 

 honey such as is guaranteed by the 

 New Zealand honey graders, and we 

 would find that our oak stick would 

 sink only 7 inches. Therefore 7 

 cubic inches of such honey would be 

 equal in weight to 10 cubic inches of 

 pure water, consequently the honey 

 would be 1 i-1 times the weight of 

 water, or, expressing it in proper 

 form, the specific gravity of the 

 honey would be 1.42. 



Our block of wood is really a me- 

 ter or measure, and as it is mostly 

 used in water solutions, it is called a 

 hydrometer. It has, however, a few 

 drawbacks. In the first place it is 

 rather bulky, necessitating a very 

 large quantity of fluid to float it, 



