PRACTICAL PAPERS—BEE-KEEPING. 
308 
The following year, 1869, a somewhat different state of 
things existed, but none the less fatal to the bee keepers inter¬ 
ests, nevertheless. 
It was this. The whole country was flooded with heavy 
rains during the entire season when bees are most active and 
successful in the collection of their stores. Bees could hardly 
leave their hives without getting wet. If the day was suffi¬ 
ciently propitious to allow the more energetic and restless to 
get out of the hive, there was generally so much moisture in 
the air and in the capsules of honey-bearing plants, that what 
little honey there was, was thin and greatly diluted. What 
little was obtained then, was in a condition to*ferment and sour 
before it could be sealed up. In the winter following, there¬ 
fore, many colonies soon found themselves with insufficient 
supplies, and therefore perished, while others, that seemed to 
have acquired more honey, found their stores unfit for healthy 
nutrition, and soon died from dysentery contracted by eating 
unwholesome food. 
It may be unsafe to say what precise proportion of the bees 
that occupied the stands of our Wisconsin bee keepers in the 
fall of 1869 perished before the spring of 1870 ; but compe¬ 
tent judges, bee keepers of many years’ experience, claim that 
the mortality was much more universal than in the year pre¬ 
vious. Nearly all persons who began the business that year 
became disheartened and gave it up as a profitless, and thank¬ 
less task. Many old and successful bee-keepers who had 
made this an important branch of home industry, lost every 
colony of bees they possessed. The calamity was so general 
and fatal that it will require three years of successful effort to 
restore these interests to the position they occupied in 1867. 
Prior to these years of disaster we had begun to suppose that 
bee keeping could be made profitable in Wisconsin. Since 
then many persons seem to doubt the proposition. The abund¬ 
ant deposits of honey in 1870 have, however, partially restored 
confidence among those whose faith in the profits of bee cul¬ 
ture was never well grounded on the evidence of experience. 
