66 



SEVENTH ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE 



remains that it has not all gone to the 

 aggrandizement of the personal indi- 

 viduals. We have a maginflcent build- 

 ing. I hope you will see it and utilize 

 it and enjoy it. 



In the name of the State of Penn- 

 sylvania, the Pennsylvania Bee-Keep- 

 ers' Association, and in the name of 

 the City of Harrisburg, we welcome 

 you to our city, and hope you will 

 have a profitable and pleasant meet- 

 ing. (Applause). 



—THE PRESIDENT: 



In response I cannot say more than 

 that the National extends their hearty 

 thanks, or rather I do on behalf of 

 them, for the kind manner in which 

 the Professor has tendered his ad- 

 dress of welcome. 



As remarks from the President 

 perhaps are in order, I would say, 

 ladies and gentlemen, fellow citizens, 

 and workers in bee culture, that this 

 is perhaps, as already alluded to by 

 the Professor, the most ennobling pur- 

 suit in all the world, and I might say 

 sublime. When we come to contem- 

 plate the works of the great Creator 

 we find something that is sublimely 

 grand and far beyond our reach, but 

 in the matter of bee culture we find 

 development in so many varied ways 

 that we cannot but acknowledge it to 

 be the greatest of all agricultural pur- 

 suits in respect to the diversity of 

 knowledge. In the first place we have 

 the wonderful workings of the hive in 

 comb structure which is beyond the 

 best mathematicians or geometrical 

 minds fathoming. There is not a man 

 in this audience who can say positively 

 just how the bee gets the measure- 

 ment for the respective cells she builds 

 — the worker and drone cell sizes — and 

 furthermore ho-vy she reaches the ex- 

 act thickness of the cells which vary- 

 very slightly in thousands of them. 

 Furthermore, we have then in this 

 connection a man who is a thorough 

 going bee-keeper, he naturally be- 

 comes a student of the anatomy and 

 physiology of the bee, and there is so 

 much to be reached, the depth is so 

 great, it will take years and years be- 

 fore we understand it perfectly! and 

 then this beautiful structure of the 

 bee. the apparatus by which she col- 

 lects pollen, and the tongue sipping the 

 honey, and the digestive apparatus and 

 the assimilating of the food element to 

 produce the wax, we know only par- 

 tially. And then, furthermore, a good 

 bee-keeper ought to be something of a 



botanist. He ought to have some 

 knowledge of insects; he should be an 

 entomologist to be thoroughly familiar. 

 I must say I am not as well up in these 

 things as I ought to be, although I 

 have devoted years and years to imi- 

 croscopic observation of the anatomy 

 and physiology of the bee; and I have 

 found errors upon errors in our stan- 

 dard works, .but they have come down 

 through difficulties; and, like inven- 

 tions, they have been brought out grad- 

 ually; we find development in all me- 

 chanical lines; it has taken the life- 

 time of an individual to produce that 

 development; the object has been to 

 produce a penfect article or approxi- 

 mately so, and it has taken perhaps a 

 century. 



I think perhaps that I should make 



a remark in reference to the early his- 

 tory of bee culture in connection with 

 the easy methods of doing things. 

 When I first studied the Quimby 

 methods and became acquainted with 

 Mr. Quimby it was easy going ahead 

 to produce a little bit of honey, but we 

 have got up a little now; we are in 

 the high tension age; it is extremely 

 high in the matter of a few colonies of 

 bees. In the early days I picked up the 

 chilly ones in the early spring and 

 helped them into the entrance. We 

 cannot do it in these high tension 

 times. We must get what we can and 

 let the rest go, and make our appli- 

 ances so tbat we can use our efforts to 

 the greatest advantage. There are 

 things we recall in the early days of 

 bee-keeping. For instance, as to the 

 hiving of swarms, Mr. Quimby stated 

 in his early work that there were 

 charms about the swarming season 

 that the indifferent beholder could 

 never realize. Mr. Langstroth said it 

 • was one of the most beautiful sights 

 in all the compass of rural economy. 

 But today while it may be a beauti- 

 ful sight, it is not quite as interesting; 

 we want to suppress swarming; and 

 there are a thousand and one things 

 that come to us in this high tensfon 

 age. Although we enjoy the natural 

 history, the physiology, the anatomy, 

 the comb structure, the diversified 

 work of the colony, yet it is driven out 

 of us by the hard effort of lifting heavy 

 supers of honey; and the excitement 

 to suppress swarming, the matter of 

 wintering successfully, the getting 

 them into winter quarters, and the 

 feeding in such seasons as this, bring 

 us to a high tension. My friend Mr. 



