30 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



c 



OUR FOOD PAGE 



AFTER t h e 

 articles on 

 V i t amines 

 in the Septem- 

 ber and October 

 issues a cautious 

 adviser express- 

 ed tlie fear that 

 I might be go- 

 ing too deeply 



into a subject which most of the readers 

 could not understand and in which they 

 lacked interest. If the number of letters 

 from subscribers are a measure of an ar- 

 ticle's popularity, then I have no doubt as 

 to the advisability of discussing vitamines. 

 Only one of my other subjects has brought 

 so many letters, and some of these letters 

 make me feel dubious for fear my little ar- 

 ticles are not scientific enough for the very 

 intelligent readers of Gleanings. A number 

 of letters have come fTom the various state 

 agricultural experiment stations, which 

 leads me to hope that further feeding ex- 

 periments may be conducted by _ scientific 

 investigators who are themselves interested 

 in bee culture and the production of honey. 

 There is much yet to learn about vitamines 

 in honey. 



A year ago last summer, before any re- 

 search work had been done by Prof. Hawk 

 on honey, I learned what I ought to have 

 known before, that there is more or less pol- 

 len dust in honey. Thereupon I advanced the 

 theory that there might be the fat-soluble 

 vitaniine in honey, for it seemed reasonable 

 to me to assume that it would be in the pol- 

 len, a natural food for the bees. But my 

 husband, my son, who is an enthusiastic un- 

 dergraduate chemist, my brother, and the 

 consulting chemist of our company rather 

 squelched me. Possibly they thought the 

 amount of pollen dust was too minute to be 

 considered; they hated to admit that pollen 

 dust was in honey at all, or they did not 

 think pollen likely to contain the fat-soluble 

 vitamine. 



Later, when Prof. Hawk found distinct 

 amounts of the fat-soluble vitamine in comb 

 honey I still secretly believed it might be 

 due to the pollen in the honey. As I have 

 said before, it is unreasonable to suppose 

 that Nature would waste such a valuable 

 food constituent in the container of the 

 food. And now comes a letter from R. F. 

 Holtermann of Canada, who is both a well- 

 informed and practical beekeeper, with the 

 same theory, and altho we may both be 

 wrong I will quote briefly from his letter: 

 "In reference to vitamines in comb or 

 extracted honey, will you allow me to make 

 a guess! It is that the vitamines will be 

 found in the pollen, and that there will be 

 found as many and more of them in pollen 

 as in any available food. More — the time 

 may come when pollen in nice new comb 

 will be in great demand where health would 

 indicate the advisability of such." 



A few days ago I received au S. O. S. 



1 



January, 1921 



call from a dis- 

 tracted young 

 office man. In 

 his enthusiasm 

 for honey he had 

 written a whole- 

 sale grocery firm 

 that it had re- 

 cently been dem- 

 onstrated that 

 there were distinct amounts of vitamines in 

 comb honey. The firm wrote back: "The in- 

 formation in your letter is interesting, but 

 what are vitamines?" 



But the fame of vitamines is rapidly 

 spreading, as the following quotation from 

 the December number of a popular women 's 

 magazine will prove: "As for the detective, 

 he should be as inscrutable as a vitamine. ' ' 



SOME of you who were interested in the 

 articles, "An Hour With Luther Bur- 

 bank" and "More About Luther Bur- 

 bank ' ' last summer may recall that Mr. 

 Burbank promised me a box of spineless 

 cactus fruit in the fall and two of the won- 

 derful, fast-growing walnut trees, and per- 

 haps you wondered at the time if he would 

 remember his promise. You know many of 

 us nowadays excuse ourselves for our failure 

 to answer letters and attend to other duties 

 on the ground that we are so busy that we 

 simply cannot do everything. Mr. Burbank 

 impressed me as the busiest man I ever met, 

 and I know some frightfully busy ones, in- 

 cluding the man nearest related to me; but 

 this quotation from Mr. Burbank 's letter 

 of Nov. 4 illustrates how this busiest of men 

 remembers his promises, and I had not writ- 

 ten him a word to remind him either: "We 

 will send the two walnut trees promised as 

 soon as we can dig and pack them. ' ' 



And a further quotation as to the fruit is: 

 ' ' I am sending a box of eight or ten varie- 

 ties of the cactus fruit, tho we could not, 

 of course, send the thin-skinned, tender, 

 most delicious ones, as they are too soft and 

 some of them ripen much earlier than these, 

 and some much later, in fact, all the fall 

 and winter. You will notice that for most 

 of these the big seeds have been reduced to 

 the size of tomato seeds, and you will notice 

 the varied flavors of the different ones, even 

 tho picked before they were quite ripe. * * 

 * * I have now 600 varieties of every fla- 

 vor, color, form, and size that the imagina- 

 tion could well suggest." 



Mr. Burbank at the same time sent a box 

 of the fruit to my father in Bradentown, 

 Fla.; but like the enthusiastic, eighty-year- 

 old boy that he is, father prolonged the 

 pleasures of his automobile trip to that 

 place by going out of his way and did not 

 reach there until the day before Thanks- 

 giving. I imagine therefore that the fruit 

 was spoiled before he saw it. 



My box followed the letter within a few 

 days and was in very good condition. How 

 I wish I could have treated every one of you 



