YIELDS DELICIOUS FOOD.
A last inducement to apiculture, certainly not unworthy of mention, is the offerings it brings to our tables. Health, yea, our very lives, demand that we should eat sweets. It is a truth that our sugars, and especially our commercial syrups, are so adulterated as to be often poisonous. The apiary, in lieu of these, gives us one of the most delicious and wholesome of sweets, which has received merited praise, as food fit for the gods, from the most ancient time till the present day. To ever have within reach the beautiful, immaculate comb, or the equally grateful nectar, right from the extractor, is certainly a blessing of no mean order. We may thus supply our families and friends with a most necessary and desirable food element, and this with no cloud of fear from vile, poisonous adulterations.
WHAT SUCCESSFUL BEE-KEEPING REQUIRES.
MENTAL EFFORT.
No one should commence this business who is not willing to read, think and study. To be sure, the ignorant and unthinking may stumble on success for a time, but sooner or later, failure will set her seal upon their efforts. Those of our apiarists who have studied the hardest, observed the closest, and thought the deepest, have even passed the late terrible winters with but slight loss.
Of course the novice will ask. How and what shall I study?
EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.
Nothing will take the place of real experience. Commence with a few colonies, even one or two is best, and make the bees your companions at every possible opportunity. Note every change, whether of the bees, their development, or work, and then by earnest thought strive to divine the cause.
LEARN FROM OTHERS.
Great good will also come from visiting other apiarists. Note their methods and apiarian apparatus. Strive by conversation to gain new and valuable ideas, and gratefully adopt whatever is found, by comparison, to be an improvement upon your own past system and practice.