328 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL, 



May 25, 1899. 



PLBLISHT WEEKLY BY 



Qeorqe W. York & Company, 



116 Michigan St., Ciiicago, III. 



ONE DOLLAR A YEAR. 



SAMPLE COPY FREE. 



[Entered at the Post-Office at Chicag-o as Second-Class Mail Matter.] 



United States Bee- Keepers' flssociation. 



Organized to advance the pursuit of .Apiculture ; to promote the interests 

 of bee-keepers ; to protect its members ; to prevent the adulteration of 

 Uouey ; and to prosecute the dishonest huney-commission men. 



Meaibersblp JFae~91.00 per Aantim, 



Executive Committee— Pres., E. Whitcomb; Vice-Pres., C. A. Hatch- 

 Secretary, Dr. A. B. Mason, Station B, Toledo, Ohio. 



Bo.iRD OF Directors— E. R. Root; E. Whitcomb; E. T. Abbott; C. P 

 Dadant; W. Z. Hutchinson; Dr. C. C. Miller. 



Ge.n'l Manager and Tke.isurer— Eugene Secor, Forest City, Iowa. 



Places and Date of I^ext Meeting : 



Is Franklin Institute, 



IS South 7th Street, between Market and Chestnut Sts., Philadelphia, Pa. 



September S, 6 and 7, 1S99. Everv bee-keeper is invited. 



VOL. 39. 



MAY 2,5, 1899. 



NO. 21. 



Note— The American Bee Journal adopts the Orthorr 



ra|>liy of the follow- 



ing- Rule, recommended liy the joint acti<m of the American Philolog- 

 ical Association and the Philological Society of England; — Change 

 "d" or "ed" final to "t" when so pronounced, except when the "e" af- 

 fects a preceding sound. 



The Canadian Pure Honey Bill.— The text of this bill, 

 for which S. T. Pettit workt so hard, is given in the Bee- 

 Keepers' Review and in Gleanings, in which appears the 

 following proviso : 



" Provided that this Act shall not be interpreted or con- 

 strued to prevent the giving of sugar in any form to bees, 

 to be consumed by them as food." 



This does away entirely with the charge that the bill 

 was intended in anj' way to punish a man for feeding needy 

 bees. 



" Supply = Dealing Editors" is the heading of an edi- 

 torial in Gleanings in which Editor Root " talks back "' a 

 little to Messrs. Doolittle and Hutchinson, who seemed to 

 feel a brake was needed with reference to booming new 

 things. He says fence separators are no new thing, nor 

 are plain sections. For about ten years plain sections have 

 been used by Mr. Aspinwall, and fences b3' Miles Morton. 

 B. Taylor, W. S. Pouder and others advocated the same 

 general scheme years ago. He mentions that thick top- 

 bars had been used by J. B. Hall and others for years before 

 Dr. Miller and he began to push them, and he gets in a sU' 

 dig at Doolittle, by saying that Doolittle at first opposed 

 these same thick top-bars and now advocates and uses them. 

 He does not claim that drawn foundation was an entire 

 success, but as the experiments and necessary machinerj- 



cost S2,000, and less than 200 pounds of the product were 

 sold, thus making the loss fall upon the manufacturers, he 

 thinks bee-keepers ought not to complain ver_v bitterly, es- 

 pecially as the new thin-base foundation has resulted. Even 

 if some of the things advocated have been abandoned, Mr. 

 Root says : 



" In order to make progress in any branch of industrj-, 

 some things have to be tried and discarded. In the apicul- 

 tural world it would be strange if something did not have 

 to be thrown overboard." 



The Official Year.Book The Department of Agricul- 

 ture's Year-Book is ready for distribution. An edition of 

 500,000 copies has been provided, of which 470,000 will be at 

 the disposal of congressmen. Write your senator or repre- 

 sentative in congress, therefore, for a copy of this work. It 

 is of unusual interest and value this year. 



The Adulterated Food Investigation, which we men- 

 tioned last week, closed for the present here in Chicago, 

 Fridaj-, May 12. On that date we. with Secretary Moore 

 and Vice-President Mrs. Stow, of the Chicago Bee-Keepers' 



Association, appeared before the Senate inquiry commit- 

 tee, to testify concerning the adulteration of honey as prac- 

 ticed here in Chicago. The Evening Post of May 12 had 

 the following condenst report of the proceedings, which of 

 course doesn't show nearly all of the testimony given : 



ADUI,TER.\TION OF HONEY. 



The early part of the session was not unlike a conven- 

 tion of bee-keepers. Up to nearly noon the committee was 

 hearing statements from bee-keepers as to the adulteration 

 of honey. George W. York, editor of the American Bee 

 Journal, said to the committee this practice was being car- 

 ried on at present to an alarming extent. It was not the 

 bee-keepers, he said, who were doing this, but the jobbers 

 almost exclusively. The only adulterant he knew of that 

 was used was glucose, and the fact that the jobbers were 

 resorting to fraudulent methods, in his mind, was ample 

 proof that some legislation is necessary to protect the bee- 

 keepers. The object of adulterating honey was solely for 

 pecuniary purposes. Glucose, he said, was worth probablj' 

 one cent a pound, while pure honey in the liquid was worth 

 7 or 8 cents. Only in the liquid form, he thought, was there . 

 any adulteration. That honey which is bought in the comb 

 is always reliable, because there is no way for manufac- 

 turers to successfully imitate the work of the busy little 

 insects in making combs. Some jobbers, he said, put some 

 honey in the comb into a g'lass jar and poured glucose over 

 it, giving it an appearance as if the honey had run out of 

 the comb into the jar. The presence of comb in such 

 quantities of liquid honey was in itself, witness stated, 

 ample proof that it had been adulterated, for no " first- 

 class " bee-keeper ever put up liquid honey mixt with the 

 comb. 



Senator Harris askt witness if anj' attempt ever was 

 made to feed bees with glucose in order to make the product 

 larger. Mr. York told of an instance where 300 colonies of 

 bees were taken into Mississippi, and an attempt was made 

 to feed them with glucose. The result was that all died. It 

 would be useless to try this experiment, he said, because 

 bees would not eat glucose to any great extent. 



NO PRESERVATIVES ARE USED. 



"Witness said no preservatives were used in honey ; that 

 there was a great possibility of honey granulating, but so 

 far as he knew there was nothing done to prevent this, ex- 

 cepting to abstract the honey from the comb and put it on 

 the market in this form. He quoted a statement from one 

 of the adulterators of honey, who said the honey he put on 

 the market for his customers contained seven-eighths glu- 

 cose and one-eighth pure honey, which he considered really 

 was glucose adulterated with honej-, rather than the re- 

 verse ; but it was sold as " honey." 



The only aid the bees are given in producing honey, 

 according to Mr. York, was the furnishing- by the owners 

 of a base for the combs. These manufactured bases are the 

 size of the box which contains the honey-comb, and are 

 placed in the middle of the box to help out the insect, as 

 well as to guide it in making perfectly straight tiers of cells. 

 The.se bases are made of beeswax, and are perfectly pure, 



