16 Kansas State Horticultural Society. 



There are other reasons why I try for comb honey. The diflRculty one 

 contends with in its production makes it a sort of sporting proposition that 

 appeals to me. If some one else can do a thing that I want to do, and he 

 does it successfully, I want to do it or know just what that fellow knows that 

 I do not know. I am not different in this from other men. The fact that an 

 object is a little difficult to obtain makes most of us want it more. And there 

 is no doubt about it being more difficult and that it requires a better informed 

 bee man to produce marketable comb honey than it does to produce ex- 

 tracted honey. 



I am also willing to agree with some men who say. that there is a desirable 

 flavor in comb honey that is not in extracted honey. I am unable to say why. 

 And I am also convinced that there is some sort of a chemical difference. For 

 instance, this winter while getting my comb-honey supers ready for the bees 

 I found several half-filled sections of honey. Part were sealed and part un- 

 sealed. The sealed and the unsealed were both liquid, while that which 

 was extracted last fall was long ago crystallized hard. Those partly filled 

 sections were simply delicious and had a distinctly different flavor from the 

 extracted honey made the same season and extracted last fall. 



Then the beauty of the product appeals to me also. It is actually a 

 pleasure to me to open supers of fine comb honey, scrape then! clean, put 

 them in the shipping case, stamp their net weight, nail them up and put them 

 in tiers, glass side out, that I can see the whole tier. It looks good to other 

 people also. I do not believe any person ever came into my shop while I 

 had comb honey in sight who did not remark upon the beauty of the product. 

 Now, I really enjoy doing anything with bees, with the possible exception of 

 twisting an extractor or feeding a large number of robbing colonies in the late 

 .fall. I can work longer without getting tired, and enjoy about every minute 

 of it, in working with or packing comb honey. 



There is another reason why I produce comb honey if I can, and that is, 

 it is easy to sell and has always sold for a good price. If one has, say, 100 

 cases of comb honey to sell in September it makes a nice bunch of money 

 coming in at a time when I am likely to be broke or at the breaking point, 

 and a' check which that much comb honey brings in looks good to me at any 

 time; but when one begins to feel as if something was wrong with one's finan- 

 ces, and a check for from $500 to $700 comes in it does something towards roll- 

 ing the dark clouds away, beheve me. For instance, last summer was a mighty 

 poor honey year for me, but I managed to induce the bees to produce 260 

 cases of comb honey. One hundred cases were sold at $6 per case and the 

 balance I got $6.25 for, delivered at the river. That brought $1,600, less the 

 freight, and I had it all during the first week in September. There are dozens 

 of people in my own little town who will not buy extracted honey, but do 

 buy comb honey. They are people who do not think the extracted adulter- 

 ated, either'; they simply prefer comb honey. The cities are full of people 

 who do not consider extracted honey at all, and a lot of them know nothing 

 about any honey but comb honey, and as a rule they are people who are 

 able and willing to pay more for it than they would for extracted honey. 

 They should pay more, I think; as a general thing they should pay about 

 twice as much per pound, considering a section a pound, as they should pay 

 for extracted honey. Comb honey is the product of a specialist, in a way. 



