32 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Jax. 1. 



who say and do the most in conventions; but 

 when it conies to practical experience as touch- 

 ing the production of comb or extracted honey 

 —well, they know how to " get th(!rp." 



The American ApicuUurist for January lias 

 got things just a little mixed in regard to the 

 Albany convention. On page 11 this sentence 

 occurs: "The great convention has met. and 

 was a grand blank, as will be seen by the re- 

 port of its proceedings in this issue." In justice 

 to that convention, and to Mr. Henry Alley, we 

 gladly make an explanation. INIr. Alley says 

 he originally wrote that the convention was a 

 grand sitcc'ess. At the time the galley proof 

 passed through his hands he was not sure 

 whether it was a success or a failure, and so 

 drew his pen across the word " success " and 

 wi-ote in the margin, " Leave this blank." Mr. 

 A. closes up his letter thus: " I'll be blast if the 

 girl didn't insert the woi'd hhmk. What a 

 blunder!" Yes. Mr. Alley, it was quite a blun- 

 der. We would suggest the propriety of read- 

 ing the page as well as the galley proofs. We 

 members of the Albany convention will forgive 

 you this time. 



J. W. PoRTEU. of Charlottesville. Va., sends us 

 the following letter from the Assistant Secre- 

 tary of Agriculture, Edwin Willits. which will 

 explain itself : 

 DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE, 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 



OfBce of Assistant Secretary. 



December 7, 1891. 



Mr. J. W. Porter:— Yours of tlie 4tl) instant, 

 mailed the evening- of the 5th, reached rue this 

 morning-, with reference to tlie meeting of the North 

 American Bee keepers' Association next year in 

 Washing-ton, under the auspices of the Department 

 of Agriculture. 



In answer I have to say it will he gratifying- to 

 this Department to have such meeting held here at 

 1 lie time indicated, and we shall be most happy to 

 furnish your Association with every facility ni our 

 [lower, both as to rooms for the meeting of the as- 

 sociation, and as to cooperation in other respects 

 <in our part. Will you please communicate this 

 fact to the association, and oblige 

 Yours truly. 



Edwin Willits, Assistant Sec'y? 



Good! We have a friend in court. Mr. 

 Willits will beliemerabered as former president 

 of the Michigan Agricultural College, and as 

 an old friend and co- laborer of Prof. A. J. Cook. 

 He has, therefore, more than an oi'diuary inter- 

 est in bees and bee-keepers. We feel that we 

 but voice the sentiment of the association when 

 we express our thanks to him for his interest in 

 our behalf. Mr. Porter wrote a letter to the 

 writer, urging that the next meeting of the 

 North American be held in Washington. When 

 Capt. Heth(>rington proposed the capital of the 

 United States, we stated the contents of Mr. 

 P.'s letter, and fell in with the scheme at once. 

 You know the rest. 



After Oliver Foster, of Mt. Vernon, la., se- 

 cured a lower freight classili cation on honey, 

 granulated, shipped in pails, we asked for a 

 simpler method of solidifying honey on short no- 

 tice. Th(» ijroblem had been, not how tf) gran- 

 ulate it, but how to keep it from doing so; but 

 thei-e an^ certain reasons wliy, in some cases, 

 it would be desirable Ui have the liquid product 

 candi(^d on short notice, trranulated honey 

 ships more readily, and consumers are already 

 demanding it that way for table use. No one 

 seems to have answered our inquiry; but quite 

 by accident we ran across the following, in the 

 British Bee Journal, the editor of which ti-ans- 

 lates it from a French bee-journal. Lc BuUetin 

 Apicule: 



If the bee-keeper wislies to have liis honey grranu- 

 lated witliout having to wait six or seven weeks, he 

 can, after a week, churn it the same as is done wltli 

 cream to obtain butter. Honey treated in this way 

 granulates with a ver.v fine grain. We have just 

 tried this process on lioiiey that had been exti-acted 

 eight days, and in flfteen minutes the lioney, in a 

 one-pound bottle, passed from tlie thin liquid state 

 to a thick syrui>. Sometimes honey granulates in 

 coarse grains, wliich makes purchasers think that 

 it is adulterated, ft can be melted in a water hath 

 and tlieii exposed to cold, wlien it will granulate 

 very flue. 



There, friend Foster, and everybody else who 

 is interested, here is a plan that will probably 

 work — that is, if you can't wait till cold weath- 

 er. 



"HONEY GLrCOSED BY THE HUNDREDS OF 

 TONS." 



We have just received the following letter 

 from M. H. Tweed, which will explain itself: 



Friend Rixjt: — I don't understand why lioney- 

 producers as an organized body do not do some- 

 thing toward helping on the time when this nation 

 will have a pure-food law, such as every even 

 half ci^^lized nation has all over the world, except- 

 ing tills. It would help the bee-keeper wonderfully. 

 Thousands of people in cities do not use honey to 

 any extent, not liet'ause they do not like it, but sim- 

 ply because they have no coiitidence in the article 

 they l)uy, whether it he comb or extracted. Now, to 

 show how such a law would help, take a look at the 

 good that is done by the one in Ohio. You ask a 

 dealer in maple syruii ill Pittsburg if he has pure 

 maple .syrup. He will, if he has any ( >liio syrup on 

 hand, at once say, "Yes, this is from Ohio, and I 

 can guarantee it pure, for they have a strict law 

 there against the adulteration of it." It inspires 

 coiitideiii-e ill llie article at once— .so much so that 

 the (lislioiiest dealer says his syrup is from Ohio, 

 whether it be the truth or not. And another advan- 

 tage would be that, instead of hundreds of tons of 

 glucose being sold in our cities as honey, there 

 would be that quantity of honej' sold Instead. 



Allegheny City, Pa., Dec, 1891. M. H. Tweed. 



Mr. Tweed makes a good point, providing 

 glucose is sold by the hundreds of tons for hon- 

 ey, or mixed with extracted honey. But we can 

 not believe that such a state of things exists; 

 that is. we think our correspondent is misin- 

 formed. If so, we should have had some ink- 

 ling of it before this. We have carefully trac- 

 ed down all these cases of glucosing extracted 

 honey, and, with the exception of one case in 

 Detroit and one in Chicago ferreted out by Mr. 

 Newman we found that nothing but pure honey 

 was sold. We do not deny the existence of 

 mistrust on the part of consumers as to the 

 purity of extracted honey; and this mistrust, 

 although i luay be entirely unfounded in fact, 

 does almost the damage if the practice existed 

 in reality. Now. let us have the facts. Let us 

 face the lion in his den. //extracted honey 

 is glucosed to any great extent it would be 

 folly for bee-keepers and bee- papers to try to 

 cover it up for fear of the bad effect on the 

 general public. Gleanings is willing to invest 

 some money in liaving the truth brought to 

 light. We should be glad to have those wlio 

 have positive evidence give us information, 

 and we will see what can be done. Bee-keep- 

 ers may depend upon it that they will have the 

 hearty support of ail the bee-papers and of all 

 bee-associations, including the North Ameri- 

 can and the H(^e-k'<M'iiers' Union. Now, we as 

 bee-keepers should handle this matter delicate- 

 ly and wisely, and be very careful about raising 

 a false alarm unless there' is real ground for 

 alarm; and if glucosing does exist to any con- 

 siderable extent, by all means let us go in for a 

 pure-food law that will include honey — not 

 only for the State of Ohio, but for every State. 



\Vhatever we do. it should be thoroughly un- 

 derstood that coinh honey can not be glucosed; 



