FEEDING FOR PROFIT. 828 
cows secrete milk from any acceptable food, is a complete 
delusion. 
It is true that they can make white comb from almost 
every liquid sweet, because wax being a natural secretion 
of the bee, can be made from all saccharine substances, as 
fat can be put upon the ribs of an ox by any kind of nour- 
ishing food. But the quality of the comb has nothing to 
do with its contents; and the attempt to sell, as a prime 
article, inferior sweets, stored in beautiful comb, would be 
as truly a fraud as to offer for good money, coins which, 
although pure on the outside, contain a baser metal within. 
Different kinds of honey or sugar-syrup fed to the bees 
can be as readily distinguished, after they have sealed them 
up, as before. 
Tbe Golden Age of bee-keeping, in which bees are to 
transmute inferior sweets into such balmy spoils as were 
gathered on Hybla or Hymettus, is as far from prosaic 
reality as the visions of the poet, who saw— 
“A golden hive, on a golden bank, 
Where golden bees, by alchemical prank, 
Gather gold instead of honey.” 
Even if cheap sugar could be ‘‘ made over’’ by the bees 
so as to taste like honey, it would cost the producer, taking 
into account the amount consumed (223) in elaborating 
wax, almost if not quite, as much as the market price of 
white clover honey; and, if he feeds his bees after the 
natural supplies are over, they will suffer from filling up 
their brood cells. 
617. The experienced Apiarist will fully appreciate the 
necessity of preventing his bees getting a taste of forbidden 
sweets, and the inexperienced, if incautious, will soon learn 
a salutary lesson. Bees were intended to gather their 
supplies from the nectaries of flowers, and, while following 
their natural instincts, have little disposition to meddle 
with property that does not belong to them; but, if their 
