FEEDING. 
275 
bo wintered out of doors, they should have at least 
twenty-five pounds* of honey. 
All attempts to derive profit from selling cheap honey 
fed to bees, have invariably proved unsuccessful. The 
notion that they can change aU sweets, however poor their 
quality, into good honey, \ on the same principle that 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 
nourishing food. But the quality of the comb has nothing 
to do with its contents ; and the attempt to sell, as a prime 
article, inferior honey, stored in beautiful comb, is as truly 
a fraud as to offer for good money, coins which, although 
pure on the outside, contain a baser metal within. 
The quality of honey depends very little, if any, upon 
the secretions of the bees ; and hence, apple-blossom, white 
clover, buckwheat, and most other varieties of honey, 
have each its peculiar flavor.^ 
* In movablc-comb hives, the amount of stores may bo easily ascertained by 
actual inspection. The weight of hives is not always a safe criterion, as old combs 
are heavier than now ones, besides being often over-stored (p. 82) with bee- 
bread. 
t When the bees are rapidly storing their combs, they disgorge the contents of their 
honey-sacs as soon as they roturn from the Holds. That the honey undergoes no 
change during the short time it remains in their sacs cannot positively be affirmed, 
but that it can undergo only a very slight change is ovident from the fact that the 
different kinds of honey or sugar-syrup fed to the boos can be almost as readily dis- 
tinguished, after they have sealed them up, as before. 
The Golden Age of boe-kooping, in which boos are to transmute inferior sweets 
into such balmy spoils as wore gatherod on llybla or Ilymottus, is as far from prosaic 
reality as the visions of the poet, who saw— 
** A golden hivo, on a golden bank, 
Where golden boos, by alchemical prank, 
Gather gold instead of honey.” 
% “That boes gather honey, but do not secrete it, is argued from the fact that 
bee-keepers And colls lllled with honey (in now swarms) on tho first or second day.'’ 
— Aristotle. 
