THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW, 



111 



and the list will show who is who. If many 

 new members should come in after the list 

 had been printed, a new list could be print- 

 ed and distributed. It has happened that a 

 man has gone home from a convention not 

 knowing that some one he very much wished 

 to meet was present. The value of a con- 

 vention is greatly increased by an early ac- 

 quaintance among members. If one objects 

 to appearing upon the street with a number 

 attached to his clothing, it can be removed 

 upon leaving the hall. Friend Benton is to 

 be congratulated upon inaugurating this 

 scheme. 



The criticisms brought against the Chi- 

 cago meeting of last year, that of opening 

 the meeting with no programme arranged, 

 and of holding only a two-days' session 

 when three days had been advertised, can- 

 not be urged against the St. Joseph meeting, 

 but there was one mistake made in getting 

 up the programme, and I am not sure but it 

 is a worse one than that of having no pro- 

 gramme at all. It is not pleasant to point it 

 out, as it is evident that this feature was 

 secured at the expense of considerable 

 trouble and correspondence and with the 

 best of intentions. I have reference to the 

 securing and reading of long papers descrip- 

 tive of bee-keeping in foreign lands. They 

 were evidently prepared with great care, and 

 were really interesting reading, but they 

 could have been read in the journals and en- 

 joyed just as much as to have heard them 

 read at the convention. We cannot afford 

 to travel hundreds of miles to listen to what 

 we can just as well read in the journals. 

 The only use for essays at a convention — no, 

 I think I better modify that a little, the 

 principle use for essays at a convention 

 should be to provoke discussion. A long, 

 exhaustive essay by a master hand, an essay 

 that covers every point, leaves little room 

 for discussion, and would better be printed 

 in some journal instead of read in a conven- 

 tion. A convention should be discussion — 

 red hot discussion — from beginning to end, 

 and papers that tend to bring about this 

 condition are a help, otherwise not. 



But there is such a thing as holding a con- 

 vention down too closely to bee talk. The 

 brain becomes tired and refuses to do good 

 work. To begin in the morning and con- 

 tinue it until noon, then spend the whole af- 

 ternoon in bee talk, and stop for supper only 

 to begin again and keep it up until a late 

 hour is too much of a good thing. Then 



think of continuing this for three days ! 

 There should be frequent intermissions, or 

 the introduction of music or something of 

 this sort, and it is better that it be scattered 

 through the sessions than that one whole ses- 

 sion be given up to this sort of thing. 



Having made these criticisms it is a pleas- 

 ure to say that the St. Joseph meeting was a 

 grand success. Those western men are 

 whole souled and open handed, and so kind 

 and cordial in their manners that some of 

 them actually persuaded their wives to come 

 with them ! After the long essays had been 

 read and the question box was opened the 

 convention also seemed to open up and there 

 was a lively discussion. " What valuable 

 facts were brought to the surface ?" That 

 is what the non-attendant wants to know. 

 Now let each person who was present be 

 honest with himself and go carefully over 

 the points that he learned at the convention 

 and see how many he can count up. Those 

 who are not readers of the bee journals may 

 find quite a number ; otherwise I think it 

 will puzzle some of them to say what they 

 learned. I have put myself to this test and 

 I can remember just one thing, and that 

 made me prick up my ears and go over and 

 sit down by Mr. C. F. Lane of Lexington, 

 Missouri ; also to quiz him still further at 

 the hotel. The question of the profitable- 

 ness of feeding back honey to complete un- 

 finished sections came up, and Mr. Lane said 

 that he made it pay and he succeeded by put- 

 ting one or two colonies in a tent, piling 

 supers of unfinished sections on top of the 

 hives to the height of eight or ten supers to 

 the hive. He then brought in weak colonies, 

 or those having poor queens, or those that 

 for any cause he did not consider very de- 

 sirable colonies for wintering, and united 

 the bees with the colonies over which the 

 sections had been piled. This course filled 

 the hives and the cases of sections "jam 

 full " of bees. To feed the bees he simply 

 took unfinished combs of honey, uncapped 

 the honey that was capped, and stood the 

 combs up around the hives, and the bees 

 came out and carried in the honey and 

 finished up the sections. Of course, it is not 

 necessary to use unfinished combs for feed- 

 ing purposes, any kind of comb will answer, 

 but one would naturally use such if there 

 were any, in preference to using full combs. 

 Mr. Lane also said that after the bees had 

 been in the tent a few days they could be fed 

 with a feeder placed at the opposite end of 



