FEEDING. 275 



be wintered out of doors, they should have at least 

 twenty-five pounds* of honey. 



All attempts to derive profit from selling cheap honey 

 fed to bees, have invariably proved unsuccessful. The 

 notion that they can change att sweets, however poor their 

 quality, into good honey, \ on the same principle that cows 

 secrete milk from any acceptable food, is a complete 

 delusion. 



It is true that they can make white comb from almost 

 every liquid sweet, because wax being a natural secretion 

 of the bee, can be made from all saccharine substances, 

 as fat can be put upon the ribs of an ox by any kind of 

 nourishing food. But the quality of the comb has nothing 

 to do with its contents ; and the attempt to sell, as a prune 

 article, inferior honey, stored in beautiful comb, is as truly 

 a fraud as to offer for good money, coins which, although 

 pure on the outside, contain a baser metal within. 



The quality of honey depends very little, if any, upon 

 the secretions of the bees ; and hence, apple-blossom, white 

 clover, buckwheat, and most other vaiieties of honey, 

 have each its peculiar flavor.^ 



* In movable-comb hives, the amount of stores may be easily ascertained by 

 actual inspection. The weight of hives is not always a safe criterion, as old combs 

 are heavier than new ones, besides being often over-stored (p. 82) with bee- 

 bread. 



t When the bees are rapidly storing their combs, they disgorge the contents of their 

 honey-sacs as soon as they return from the fields. That the honey undergoes no 

 change during the short time it remains in their sacs cannot positively be affirmed, 

 but that it can undergo only a very slight change is evident from the fact that the 

 different kinds of honey or sugar-syrup fed to the bees can be almost as readily dis- 

 tinguished, after they have sealed them up, as before. 



The Golden Age of bee-keeping, in which bees are to transmute inferior sweets 

 into such balmy spoils as were gathered on Hybla or Hymettus, is as far from prosaio 

 reality as the visions of the poet, who saw 



u A golden hive, on a golden bank, 

 Where golden bees, by alchemical prank, 

 Gather gold instead of honey." 



$ " That bees gather honey, but do not secrete it, is argued from the fact that 

 bee-keepers find cells filled with honey (in new swarms) on the first or second day." 

 Aristotle. 



