ALEXANDER’S WRITINGS ON PRACTICAL BEE CULTURE 61 
what they can sell, and they will work off a lot of it. His customers 
bring a pail, and he weighs out whatever they wish. I have tried hard 
to produce and teach others how to produce large quantities of honey 
at a small expense; but one important thing in doing this is that you 
must have the best strain of bees that can be procured, and give them 
the best of care. 
Now a few words in regard to getting good customers to buy your 
surplus. First, produce honey of the best quality—honey that is of good 
body and fine flavor; then through advertising in our bee journals let 
the public know what you have and its price. In this way we have been 
successful in procuring more customers than we can supply, and every 
season we have to return postal money orders and checks sent to us for 
honey after our crop is all sold. This season, about Oct. 10, soon after 
our honey was all gone we had an order from a party who has sold over 
100 tons of our honey, for a carload to fill out a shipment to Europe. 
This order had to be canceled, and our only wish was that we had 
twice as many colonies of bees. 
In conclusion I will say, deal honorably and squarely with your 
customers, so that, after they buy of you once, they will have confidence 
in what you say, and send their orders to you again in preference to 
a stranger. In this way you will find an outlet for your honey all over 
the United States. 
December, 1906. 
WHY IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE, AND TO GIVE AWAY SAMPLES. 
I can think of no better way of getting our product before the 
public than to do as all successful business men do and manufacturers 
are now doing—that is, to advertise honey in every way we can think 
of. This is one thing we as honey producers have sadly neglected. If 
we expect to be successful in producing and selling large crops of honey, 
we must apply the same methods to our business that these successful 
business men do to theirs. Now as to the manner of advertising, each 
man must decide for himself. But advertise we must in some way. It 
is now high time we awoke to the necessity of this. 
From the little experience I have had in having a small notice in- 
serted in our bee journals and seeing its effect, I am sure that through 
them a nice large advertisement would be worth ten times its cost to 
any honey producer; and why so many of us, myself included, should 
be so negligent in this important part of our business is hard to under- 
stand. We know we have a good thing for sale—one of the best foods 
God ever gave to man; so let us join hands and place this before the 
public in a profitable way. Many business firms give away thousands 
of dollars’ worth of sample packages in order to induce the public to 
buy their goods; and I sometimes think that if the honey producers of 
this country would give away a small per cent of their honey in sample 
packages for a year or two, it would go a long way toward bringing 
