Here's an opportunity for three U. S. honey producers to win $600.00 in 1926.

The best informed men in the country tell us that the decreased production of comb honey due to a war emergency long past, is working a serious detriment to the sale of honey as a whole.

Thousands of homes in this country never buy honey nor enjoy it on the menu of their meals. Tons of section comb honey could be sold in small stores in every city, but not enough comb honey is being produced to supply the potential demand even in part.

Prices paid for comb honey in recent years have been low. This has not been due alone to lack of demand but rather to faulty marketing and advertising methods applies to the country as a whole. Not the least of the trouble has been because many do not produce a first-class article, grade it honestly and pack it adequately for shipment.

IMPORTANT

You must address all communications to the Contest Editor, P. O. Box 377, Watertown, Wisconsin. You must notify him by July 15, 1926, that you expect to enter a case of honey. He will send complete rules, etc., to anyone free. You need not ship honey to us before August 1, 1926, but your honey must reach us before September 15, 1926, or it will not be eligible in the contest. There are no entry fees nor do you bind yourself to anything in asking for information or entering this contest. The only stipulation is that the honey entered must have been produced in Lewis sections.

The G. B. Lewis Company is undertaking to arouse a latent interest in 1-Producing fine section honey; 2-Properly grading it for sale; 3-Packing it in a such a way that delivery can be made to the consumer without loss and damage.

Consequently we offer $600.00 in cash prizes, to be paid as soon after September 15, 1926 as possible, for the three best cases of 24 sections filled with honey received in salable condi tion at Watertown on or before September 15, 1926.

Any beekeeper who is not a dealer in supplies or not primarily a dealer in honey may enter. There is no entry fee and the G. B. Lewis Company will pay all expenses of the contest. All honey entered is to be the proper ty of the G. B. Lewis Co., and will be sold immediately after the contest for the highest mar ket price obtainable, such money to be returned pro rata to entrants at the earliest possible time,

Some one national authority will judge the honey, and no employee of the G. B. Lewis Company will have any thing to do with the judging nor any employee, dealer in supplies or dealer in honey may enter the contest. We assume no responsibility for the honey after we receive it but will use every care to avoid loss or damage. In case any entry is refused for cause, honey will be re-shipped on entrant's order, he to pay transportation charges both

ways.

BEE HIVES AND APIARIAN EQUIPMENT

BEWARE

WHERE YOU BUY YOUR

BEEWARE WIS.

WATERTOWN

MAKES THE FINEST.

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY 6.8.LEWIS COMPANY

"Eat More Bread and Honey"

Vol. LXVI-No. 2

Hamilton, Illinois, February, 1926

Monthly, $1.50 a Year

o Boston because of a bee man, M. A. Gill. Mr. Gill says that marketing is the least of his problems. His big question is getting honey to sell. His case is just the opposite of the farmer who maintains that anyone can raise crops, but that it takes a keen business man to sell them. He has fifty years of reliable dealing to his credit, and so the wholesale honey buyers in Kansas City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Chicago write to him every year for a standard article they are sure will come up to specifications. They know that his first-class comb honey will more often weigh 15 ounces net instead of the regulation 12 ounces. They know that his extracted honey is more likely to weigh 13 pounds than the regulation 12, and they also know that his comb honey will be packed in clean cartons, with boxes clear of all stain and with the net weight stamped on each section. The last is easy for him to do, as fifty years of handling comb honey have trained his muscles to tell instinctively without scales whether a comb weighs more or less than 12 ounces, and if there is any possible doubt the scales always settle it.

Mr. Gill's sales the past year are probably among the easiest on record. His first carload of comb honey went to Charleston, West Virginia, and included 10,000 pounds in cartons. A carload of extracted honey went to Los Angeles and the rest of this year's product was sold locally in the state. Stores in Salt Lake and Ogden took much, while many farmers in Idaho and Wyoming drove. down to Utah this fall to get their winter's supply of honey from Mr. Gill. Many of them stopped on their way back from the conference of the Mormon church, which is held in Salt Lake City the first week in October, at the same time as the

religion, pleasure and business, and are fast getting the winter honey habit, though they prefer extracted to comb. One of the orders that came to Mr. Gill was from the Students' Honey Company in Berkeley, California. That was for a carload of comb honey for students to sell at retail and thus get money to help pay for their education. A case of twenty-four sections of comb honey was taken to Boston by an enthusiastic college professor who had been teaching at the National Summer School of the Utah Agricultural College in Logan, a few miles from Mr. Gill's headquarters, and who realized that never before had honey so clear, so heavy, so completely the essence of the alfalfa-and-sweet-clover West, been seen in New England.

Mr. Gill could have sold ten times the amount he produced, judging by his orders. No wonder he is able every year to pack his bees for winter and leave with his wife to spend four or five months in California. The season this year in northern Utah was very short, lasting only from June 20 to August 8. Then cold rains came and stopped the nectar flow and left him with much unfinished comb honey on his hands. His spring count of 480 colonies, which during the season were increased to 710, were scattered about the valley in four apiaries. However, although the season was so short, the honeyflow, while it lasted, was good, and by forcing, Mr. Gill was able to report that his best colony made ten supers of comb honey, while his extracted honey averaged 184 pounds to the colony, spring count. The honey this year was a shade darker than usual, and therefore not so desirable. Its weight was due to the rare and dry air of the high altitude of northern Utah, as nectar is always thicker when gath

ered at 5,000 feet above the level of the sea.

Mr. Gill's business plant is as concentrated as a Frenchman's shop, which usually opens into the kitchen so that the housewife may tend the shop as well as the pots and kettles. Coming to Utah from Colorado in search of extensive and exclusive bee pasturage, about 15 years ago, Mr. Gill got hold of a log cabin converted by clapboards into the warmest and coolest of houses. Back of the house, in the orchard, is his main apiary, on one side of which is his packing house and extracting plant, only a step from the house. Off to the west are fields of alfalfa, with canals lined with sweet clover, and miles of railroad deep cut, also lined thick with the same plant, while all around in the country you can hire locations of desert land at $10 a location. A most unique feature of Mr. Gill's place is a windbreak of box elder trees thirty feet high, which cuts him off from the town at the east and makes a swarm of workers fly high when they start out and thus never trouble the neighbors whose barns and corrals are full of cattle. Mr. Gill knows that bees have to be humored and directed fully as much as human beings.

"They feel I am a part of nature,' says he, "because in fifty years' handling I have learned to meet their requirements. I have a bee veil, but I don't need it very much. All the same I know I must work alone, if I am going to work without it. This talk that you find in Gene Stratton Porter's 'Keeper of the Bees' about bee immunity is mostly bunk. I can walk in the midst of an apiary with perfect immunity from stings when the bees are good natured-that is, when the day is sunny and the workers are all out in the fields. But on a rainy or dark day, when they are all at home, they are just like a big family of children shut up in the

house. They can't all be good natured. Some of them have got to sting you, even if you are their best. friend. Then is the time to be careful and wear your veil."

Coming to Utah with a high business reputation from Colorado and giving the name of his town honied reputation all over the United States, it is no wonder that Mr. Gill early took an interest in his town and that his fellow citizens made him mayor, although he was not a member of the dominant church. He was born in Wisconsin, of New England descent, both of which facts make for an intelligent interest in public affairs. As a result of his mayorship he has the best story of church domination ever told by a bee man. While he was mayor he was encouraged by the leading banker of the place to start a Chamber of Commerce, for the town was already locally famous for wheat, fruit, and dairy products. It was also a hotbed of typhoid fever every fall and in vain did the Chamber of Commerce try to exterminate the disease by getting the citizens to vote bonds for a water system. They were mostly thrifty, God-fearing Danes, given to coffee drinking, and so had no need, they said of drinking water from the mountains. Finally the banker, like all good churchmen, called in the help of the church. One Sunday an apostle of the church was invited by him to address the people. His address ran something in this wise:

"Brothers and sisters, I love your town. I should like to visit you often, but I am afraid to drink your water. I have to bring bottles of water with me every time I come, and many are the times I am taken for a bootlegger. Now I want you to vote bonds and pipe a pure mountain spring down to your town. I want you to have parks and gardens and take baths."

The apostolic seed fell on receptive soil and the bonds were voted the following Tuesday and typhoid fever has disappeared from the community.

"It was no work of mine," says Mr. Gill, "but if that be church domination, give me more of it."

An unequalled producer of honey, a man who has only to pick his markets to sell to the best advantage, a community worker with the best Eastern and Western traditions, Mr. Gill, after fifty years of honey production, is still going strong. old age is one that any bee man might envy.

His

"My wife and I," he often says, "keep thinking we'll do a little less work ever year, but each year we do a little more. Perhaps that is the reason we keep going."

TH

HE agaves, commonly called century plants, are a very useful group. There are at least five species native to the United States, with some additional ones southward in Mexico. The name "Mescal" is very generally applied to these plants in many southwestern localities. An intoxicating drink made from the juice is also called by the same name.

An acquaintance with the plants common to the dry regions reveals a remarkable variety of adaptations to hard conditions. Woody plants either root very deeply or spread their root systems over a very wide area in

amount of moisture. When there is rain the plant stores up water in the leaves in anticipation of the long periods of drouth.

The natives of the southwest provide a large number of products from the century plants. A sort of wine called pulque is made from the fermented flower stems, while stronger drinks, such as tekela and mescal, are distilled from the leaves. The bulbs or crowns are roasted for food and the fibre secured from the leaves provides for ropes, shawls and other garments. The leaves are sometimes dried by the Indians and smoked in place of tobacco. Food, drink and clothing, as well as implements, all come from the one source.

The long period required for the plant to reach maturity, at which

time it puts forth its abundance of blossoms, gives rise to the well-known name "Century Plant." The time varies from seven to upwards of twenty years with different species, and depending somewhat upon environmental conditions. When grown in the north in greenhouses, the time is much longer. The plant usually dies following its bloom, but sometimes leaves behind a group of suck

ers.

Although a single plant blooms but once, there are areas in the deserts of Arizona and California where they are sufficiently common to be of considerable importance to the beekeeper. When the plant does bloom it is an amazing sight to one who has not seen it before. The flower stalk resembles a telegraph pole in size, and stalks 20 or more feet in height are not uncommon. As will be seen by the picture, flower stalks look like trees, and the number of flowers is immense. Nectar is 30 abundant that it is impossible to esti mate the quantity available from a single plant.

Although beekeepers report good crops of surplus from this source, to the honey is said be dark and strong, and salable only at a low price. Bees are reported as being uncommonly cross when working on mescal. The honey requires a long ripening period on the hives before extracting, and the quality is very poor at best. The largest average per colony reported to the writer was 90 pounds, in Old Mexico.

Sweet Clover Seed

Sweet clover seed production for the United States will exceed that of last year by 25 per cent, according to a report from the state and federal statistician at Lincoln, A. E. Anderson. The increase has been brought about by larger acreage and increased yield per acre.

Sweet clover during the past few years has increased rapidly in importance as a hay crop, and it is interesting to note that seed produc tion has kept pace with the demand. In Nebraska, production of sweet clo ver seed is expected to exceed that of last year because of increased acreage and yield per acre.

Prevailing prices in North Da kota, South Dakota, and Minnesots on September 15, were $5 to $6 per 100 pounds. The Nebraska price is expected to compare with that of Kansas, where the prevailing price i $6 to $7, with some offers of $8 to $10 per 100 pounds.

the

let