1906 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



285 



owned from six to eight hundred colonies of 

 bees, and one year produced from 35,000 to 

 40,000 lbs. of section honey, is out of the busi- 

 ness, his last colony having died some years 

 ago. Without basswood,Lhe said, he could 



not make it pay, .. 



I Un this vicinity honey is fast becoming, if 

 it has not already become, a staple grocery 

 article, and is found on the grocers' shelves 

 as surely as butter and tea or tobacco. 

 Some grooers are already refusing to sell to- 

 bacco, but sell honey instead. Let us hope 

 that honey will never produce such a morbid 

 appetite as whiskey, tobacco, or tea, that will 

 make men go many miles for it when other 

 and cheaper delicacies can be obtained near 

 at hand. 



But I see a rift in the clouds. The tem- 

 perance sentiment of the country is increas- 

 ing, and we hope and believe that at no dis- 

 tant day the commercial interests of the 

 country will unite with its moral forces and 

 crush this hydra- headed monster to the ea rth. 



It would be very pleasant if we could sit 

 ill our homes or honey-rooms and have peo- 

 ple come to us from near and far, as Doolit- 

 tle suggests, for our honey; or, as one old 

 farmer did to me, and as he is in the habit 

 of doing, some days ago, to whom I sold 50 

 lbs. of extracted honey. But this is not the 

 way the whisky and tobacco men sell their 

 wares. Am I not continually receiving cir- 

 culars from the liquor houses, advertising 

 thtir pure whiskies, tvines, etc. , ad nause- 

 am? And do I not see the advertisements 

 and pictures of the tobacconists everywhere 

 on the telephone-poles, guide-posts, and bill- 

 boards? Dogs bark at them, horses get 

 frightened at them, and the small urchin on 

 the street looks at them and marvels at the 

 mysterious qualities of tobacco that trans- 

 forms the ragged boy into the man. We 

 are told that Benjamin Franklin was the 

 first to advertise in this country, an J I have 

 sometimes fancied that bee-keepers were 

 the last to advertise, outside their trade- 

 journals; but this is only a "fancy." 



Let us not get discouraged in trying to 

 educated the people. In many places in 

 Europe honey is as often seen on the table 

 as butter, and it is as common an article of 

 diet; and as a million or so of these foreign- 

 ers are being yearly brought to our shores 

 they will want more honey. 



And while our native population is fast in- 

 creasing I believe I shall not endanger my 

 reputation as a statistician in saying that 

 the per capita consumption of honey is in- 

 creasing in this country very much faster 

 than the per-capita consumption of whisky, 

 as I shall hope to show before I close. 



I remember some fifty- five or sixty years 

 ago how my father, then an enterprising 

 farmer and bee-keeper, succeeded in secur- 

 ing one year some 50 or 75 lbs., perhaps 

 more, of "box honey." He succeeded in 

 getting the bees all out. The combs were of 

 snowy whiteness. Later he brought some 

 of it to this village for sale hoping to real- 

 ize 12^ cents per pound net. By consider- 

 able effort he succeeded in disposing of only 



a part of it, if I remember rightly, at ten 

 cents a pound, and brought the rest home. 

 I remember how sad and discouraged he look- 

 ed. This looks like a clear case of overpro- 

 duction or slow sale. 



The population of our village is probably 

 about the same to-day as fifty years ago; 

 and yet the last year I have sold, to be con- 

 sumed in this village and vicinity, some 700 

 lbs. of comb at from ] 4 to 16 cts. per lb. and 

 200 or 300 lbs. of extracted honey, to say noth- 

 ing of what other bee-keepers have £old. 



In 1860 Moses Quinby, then one of the 

 most extensive honey- producers in the Unit- 

 ed States, produced a large crop of honey, 

 and then bought of honey other bee-keepers 

 till he had some 20,000 lbs., which he sent to 

 New York. Such an unheard-of quantity of 

 honey completely broke down that market, 

 and a considerable portion of this honey 

 could not be sold at any price, and was car- 

 ried over till the next year. Certainly it 

 would appear that there were too many bee- 

 keepers in the business at that time as well 

 as now; yet to-day that city will take 500,000 

 lbs. or more without winking. 



But you say that was a long time ago, be- 

 fore the introduction of improved hives and 

 methods. Well, let's see. Take the crop 

 of 1904 here in Vermont. It went mostly to 

 the Boston market, eagerly bought up by 

 Boston dealers— i. e., the most of it. But 

 there a large part of it got stuck. I sent 

 down some fifty cases to be sold on commis- 

 sion. Some time in the winter I wrote to 

 my commission house, inquiring how the 

 honey was selling. It replied that very lit- 

 tle was sold, and that it could not sell it at 

 any price. The result was that an enormous 

 amount of honey was carried through the 

 winter and through the summer of 1905, 

 probably not less than 50,000 or 60,000 lbs. 

 Was not this a clear case of over- production, 

 or too many engaged in the business? It 

 certainly looked that way. Personally I 

 thought I understood the situation, and 

 bought another yard of bees and secured a 

 crop nearly twice as large as the previous 

 year, 1904, which has sold with reasonable 

 promptness. 



But what was the trouble with the crop 

 of 1904 that it sold so slowly? I believe 

 that neither adulteration nor over-production 

 had any thing to do with it, but, rather, the 

 fact that one or two Boston firms who wish- 

 ed to control the market, or largely so, 

 bought up the crop, paying 16 or 17 cents 

 for it so they could not sell at a fair profit 

 after paying freight, cartage, etc. , for less 

 than 18 cents, and the retail dealer had to 

 sell for 20 to 25 cents, which was more than 

 most people were willing to pay, with the 

 result that grocers bought what they could 

 sell again at a profit, and turned their backs 

 on honey, as they would very naturally do, 

 if sensible people. This was clearly a case 

 of slow selling, and also too high buying. 



Once more: If honey sells so slowly that 

 old producers, who have all the bees, and all 

 the experience and utensils necessary for 

 the successful prosecution of their business. 



