864 
VITAMINES IN HONEY 
in the first stage it was to be avoided. This 
means that the liquid should be poured in¬ 
to a barrel or keg’ from which the head has 
been removed. The more adequate the air 
supply, the shorter will be the time neces¬ 
sary to finish, the process. 
A word as to the manner of mixing 
the honey and water at the beginning of 
the process. Five parts of water to one 
part of honey, by weight, will make a liq¬ 
uid of about the right strength. Or, if one 
wishes to use washings, which are of course 
of uncertain strength, he should in some 
way determine the specific gravity or den¬ 
sity of his material. One way is to add 
either honey or water, as may be neces¬ 
sary, with constant stirring, until an egg 
will float in the liquid with only a small 
spot above the surface. A more accurate 
way is to use a hydrometer, which can be 
purchased for a small sum, thru a drug¬ 
gist. If a Baume hydrometer is used, it 
should read between 7 and 8 degrees; if 
one is to be had with the specific gravity 
scale, then the reading should be about 
1.050. 
As a final word, it may be said that dark, 
strong-flavored honeys ferment much faster 
than light, mild ones. Also it might be re¬ 
marked that the addition of almost any 
fruit juice will aid in the primary or alco¬ 
holic fermentation. 
VIRGIN QUEENS. —See Queens. 
VITAMINES IN HONEY.— In recent 
years students of nutrition have discovered 
the fact that food of sufficient energy value, 
containing ample amounts of each of 
the chemical elements known to be essential 
to the human body, is not necessarily ade¬ 
quate to meet all nutritional needs. It ap¬ 
pears that certain substances, occurring in 
natural foods but not yet chemically identi¬ 
fied, are thus vital factors in nutrition. 
These unidentified substances are known 
by the general term “vitamines.” More ex¬ 
actly, they are classifiable under three 
heads: fat-soluble A, water soluble B, and 
water soluble C. 
There is now proof that there is a mod¬ 
erate amount of fat-soluble vitamine A 
in comb honey; and it is probable that 
there are small amounts of the vitarhine, 
water-soluble B, in all honeys, but no anti¬ 
scorbutic vitamine. • 
The fat-soluble vitamine is the one which 
is often alluded to as “the growth princi¬ 
ple,” and which is contained in abundance 
in the fat of milk, the yolk of eggs, and in 
green, leafy vegetables. Incidentally, Mc¬ 
Collum of Johns Hopkins University, who 
has conducted so much research along this 
line, considers fat-soluble A of the utmost 
importance in the diet. Being much less 
widely distributed in foods than water- 
soluble B, there is much more danger of a 
deficiency of it in the diet. 
The presence of these tiny dietary essen¬ 
tials, generally termed vitamines, is not de¬ 
termined by chemical analysis. For that 
reason they are frequently alluded to as 
unidentified dietary essentials, and their 
presence or absence in foods is determined 
by a long and expensive series of feeding 
experiments upon animals, the animals 
often being white rats or guinea pigs. The 
diet of these little animals is somewhat 
similar to that of human beings, and their 
natural span of life is short enough to per¬ 
mit of conclusive experiments being con¬ 
ducted in a comparatively short time. 
The one who conducted the feeding ex¬ 
periments to determine the presence of vit¬ 
amines in honey is no less an authority 
that Philip B. Hawk, Ph.D., of Jefferson 
Medical College, Philadelphia. For years 
he has been experimenting upon the diges¬ 
tibility of various foods by a new process 
of watching the digestion at different 
stages in human beings, and he has also 
been doing research work on vitamines. He 
is a contributor to scientific journals and is 
very well known to the general public for 
his contributions to the “Ladies’ Home 
Journal.” 
He wrote a series of articles several years 
ago on the digestibility of certain foods, 
and more recently an article on vitamines. 
White rats were the animals chosen by 
Prof. Hawk for the experiments to deter¬ 
mine whether there were present in honey 
the vitamines water-soluble B and' fat-sol¬ 
uble A. .The first work was done in testing 
honey for the former. Rats were selected 
and divided into three groups, the rats from 
each litter being distributed to make the 
groups as uniform as possible. These were 
kept in sanitary cages with an abundance 
of water. One group was fed a diet known 
from previous experience to contain all the 
