8 Affords Mental Discipline. 
would have coveted; furnishes the rarest food for the 
observing faculties, and best of all, by keeping its votaries 
face to face with the matchless creations of. the A// Father, 
must draw them toward Him “who went about doing 
good,” and “in whom there was no guile.” 
YIELDS DELICIOUS FOOD. 
A last inducemeut of apiculture, certainly not unworthy 
of mention, is the offering it brings to ourtables. Health, 
yea our very lives, demand that we eat sweets. It is 
a truth that our sugars, and especially our commercial 
syrups, are so adulterated as to be often poisonous, The 
apiary in lieu of these, gives us one of the most delicious 
and wholesome of sweets, which has received merited 
praise, as food fit for the gods, from the most ancient time 
to the present day. To ever have within reach the beau- 
tiful, immaculate comb, or the equally grateful nectar, 
right from the extractor, is certainly a blessing of no mean 
order. We may thus supply our families and friends with 
a food element, and this with no cloud of fear from vile, 
poisonous adulterations. We now know that if we eat 
cane sugar—the common sugar of our tables —it is con- 
verted by the digestive fluids into a glucose like sugar, 
which is probably nearly or quite identical with honey 
sugar. The bees do the same with the nectar, which is 
dilute cane sugar, of flowers. Thus we may reason that 
honey is our most wholesome sugar, for here the bees have 
in part digested our food for us, 
ADDS TO THE NATION’S WEALTH. 
An excellent authority places the number of colonies of 
bees in the United States, in 1881, at 3,000,000, and the 
honey production for that year at more than 20,000,000 
pounds. The production for that year was not up to the 
average, and yet the cash value of the year’s honey crop 
exceeded $30,000,000. We may safely add as much more 
as the value of the increase of colonies, and we have a 
grand total of $60,000,000, nearly enough to pay the inter- 
est.on the national debt, were the bonds all refunded. And 
