ood which they give them, more water than is
absolutely necessary. To do so, is a piece of as great stupidity as to
pour a barrel of water into the sugar pans, for every barrel of sap from
the maples, or juice from the canes! If a strong colony is set upon a
platform scale, it will be found on a pleasant day, during the height of
the honey harvest, to gain a number of pounds; if examined again, early
next morning, it will be found to have lost considerably, during the
night. This is owing to the evaporation of the water from the freshly
gathered honey, and it may often be seen running down in quite a stream
from the bottom-board.

Those who feed cheap honey to sell it in the market at a high advance
over its first cost, are either deceivers or deceived; if any of my
readers have been deceived by the plausible representations of ignorant
or unprincipled men, I trust they will be able from these remarks, to
see exactly _how_ they have been deceived, and they will no longer
persist in an adulteration, the profits of which can never be great, and
the morality of which can never be defended. A man who offers for sale,
inferior honey, or sugar which he calls honey, and which he is able to
sell because it is stored in white comb, to those who would never
purchase it if they knew what it was, or once had a taste of it, is not
a whit more honest, if he understands the nature of the article in which
he deals, than a person engaged in counterfeiting the current coin of
the realm: for poor honey in white comb, is no less a fraud than eagles
or dollars, golden to be sure, on their honest exteriors, but containing
a baser metal within! "The Golden Age" of bee-keeping, in which inferior
honey can be quickly transmuted into such balmy spoils as are gathered
by the bees of Hybla, has not yet dawned upon us; or at least only in
the fairy visions of the poet who saw

"A golden hive, on a Golden Bank,
Where golden bees, by alchemical prank,
Gathered Gold instead of Honey."

If a pound of West India honey costs about 6 cents, and the bees use, as
they will, about one pound to make the comb in which it is stored, it
costs the producer at least 12 cents a pound, and if to this, he adds,
say 5 cents more, for extra time and labor in feeding, then his inferior
honey costs him at least as much as the market price of the very best
honey on the spot where it is produced! If the bee-keeper allows his
bees to make what they will, from