FEEDING. 
275 
be 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 all 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 
pmre 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. J 
* In movable-comb hives, tho 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 new ones, besides being often over-stored (p. 82) with beo- 
bread. 
t When tho boos are rapidly storing their combs, they disgorge the contents of their 
honey-sacs as soon as they return from tho fields. That tho honey undorgoos no 
change during the short time it remains in their sacs cannot positively bo affirmed, 
but that it can undorgo only a very slight change is evident from the fact that the 
different kinds of honey or sugar-syrup fed to tho boos can be almost as reudily dis¬ 
tinguished, after they have sealed them up, as before. 
Tho Golden Age of bee-keeping, in which bees aro to transmute inferior swoets 
into such balmy spoils as were gathered on Ilyblaor Hymettus, is as far from prosaio 
rcalltv as tho visions of tho poet, who saw— 
“ A golden hive, on a golden bank, 
Where golden bees, by alchemical prank, 
Gather gold instead of honey.” 
X “That bees gather honey, but do not secrete it, isarguod from tho fact that 
bee-keepers find cells filled with honey (in now swarms) o n the first or second day.'* 
— Aristotle. 
