CHAPTER XX. 
CONCLUSION. 
\W- often hear this question asked: ‘Are bees 
profitable ?” and the replies given are various, 
contradictory and amusing, varying in accordance with 
the honesty, experience, skill and success of the bee- 
keeper. Such as have attempted bee keeping with the 
old fashioned, square box hives, under the old system of 
management based on fire and brimstone, will say there 
is no profit in bees, and that you must not molest them 
at all; if you do, ‘they will run out, and you will lose 
your luck.” 
There is another class. who have adopted all the 
extravagant fancies of the patent bee hive venders, pay- 
ing large sums of money for hives worse than useless, 
with what are claimed to be patent fixtures—expecting 
a sudden fortune as the result, and found the whole thing 
a fraud. Perhaps they have been duped in this way a 
half-dozen times or more, and always with the same 
result. This class will tell you emphatically, that every- 
thing pertaining to bees is a humbug and a cheat—no 
money in them, ete. 
In presenting the statements made in this work, I am 
not blinded or influenced by any selfish motive, in con- 
