we advise every one to make bee-keeping one of the many lines of industrial pursuits, by no means enter into it without gaining the needed information. This can easily be obtained from the "Hive and Honey Bee," by Rev. Mr. Langstroth, and other books on apiculture, and from bee Journals.

One county in Wisconsin has, this past year, produced seventy thousand pounds of honey. If each county produced a like amount, the product of the state would be four millions two hundred thousand pounds of honey besides the increase of colonies. Now, there is not a single county in the state that lacks the means, the flowers or the brains, but only a little knowledge and enterprise to produce even a greater amount. Then let us put the means in reach of every school-boy and girl in our flourishing state and educate them in the science and art of apiculture, and nothing will prevent the multiplication of swarms until the tons of wasting sweets, now lost in the cells of the flora of our state, will be gathered up to sweeten and gladden the life of man.

In response to a question by some member of the convention, as to how much honey one swarm of bees would make in one day, Mr. Maryatt said:

I have had them bring me eight pounds a day. It is stated that one good swarm will produce, in the basswood season, 15 pounds. Question. What do bees make comb from, and how much honey does a new swarm carry off when they leave the old swarm?

Mr. MARYATT. I am asked two questions: Bees fill themselves with honey at the natural swarming, and a good swarm carries away about 8 or 10 pounds to start in their new home with. The honey is secreted in the abdomen and forms comb there, and they consume 25 pounds of honey in making one pound of comb. Up in the northern part of this state this year a man had forty swarms and he sold twenty of them to his neighbor, and he took them to another locality. The neighbor extracted the honey they made and got 2,000 pounds, and the former owner undertook to raise honey in boxes, from the twenty swarms kept, and he didn't get 200 pounds in the same time the other man got 2,000, using an extractor.

Now, in relation to wintering. You will find that the honey-bee is a native of a warm climate, and though we have a cold one, if

we put them in a warm place we can winter them every time, just as we can horses or sheep. I keep my bees in my cellar, and keep it warmed with a stove. Last winter I kept my bees on the average at 514 degrees.

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Question. How low do you allow the temperature to get? Answer. About 40 degrees. Mr. Grimm has 850 swarms and he puts stoves in his cellar to keep them warm.

Question. How do you keep them from stinging?

Answer. When they are filled with honey, they are just like yourself when you have a load on your back and can't stop to fight. Then they are peaceable and pleasant and they could not fight if they would. And by inducing them to partake of liquid sweets they are always peaceable. The Italian bee is not so irascible as any other kind of bees.

Question. Will bees extract honey from red clover?

Answer. Yes, if there is no other honey for them to get.

Question. Do the millers trouble Italian bees as much as the common bees?

Answer. The Italian bees are almost miller-proof. They hardly ever have any millers in their hives. There is no such thing as a miller-proof hive. But the Italian bee will not tolerate millers. Bees consume from 15 to 20 pounds of honey more per hive if kept out doors than if kept inside.

Again, most all bee-keepers, when their bees in winter make a noise, reduce the temperature from 40 to 32 degrees. Now a bee in 32 degrees is very still, making little noise. At 40 degrees they will begin to make a little more noise, and from 35 to 40 they make a very unpleasant noise, but when you raise the temperature to about 50 degrees they get on a joyful hum as in June and they feel just as though they were at home. I prefer to keep bees in the light and give them pure air and pure food. Most of our bee-writers tell us that they consume an unusual amount of honey and beat with their wings when they are cold, to generate heat and that the outside of the cluster are always exercising their wings to keep warm, and thus they keep up continual physical exercise that requires a larger consumption of food. When you keep bees in a cellar four or five months, they miss their food and in a warm day they want to fly. Well, one man says he puts them in a hot-bed and

lets them fly there for exercise and then puts them back again. But my philosophy is, that by keeping the fæces cleared away they don't care to fly about much; 50 degrees temperature evaporates the fæces.

Question. What kind of hive is best and cheapest and most easily made?

Answer. I use the Langstroth hive. The men who have used the Langstroth hive have made the most money out of it. The average life of a working bee is only fifty days in the working season.

NATURES METHOD OF SOIL FORMATION, AND THE PROCESS OF CULTURE WHICH THESE METHODS SUGGEST.

BY PROF. JOHN MURRISH, MAZOMANIE.

Let the water under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear; is the language of inspiration when calling our attention to one of the great changes that took place in the early history of our earth. This translated into scientific language would read as follows: Let the vail that separates the inorganic from the organic departments of nature be drawn back, that the crystalline and sedimentery material of the mineral kingdom may be lifted up into the preparatory department of the vegetable kingdom, and let the work of organization begin.

If we stood then upon the surface of the rock, as the waters of the ocean were receding and could have studied the forces and watched the processes by which those beautiful forms of matter in the mineral kingdom were first taken to pieces and then moulded into those forms of matter we call vegetable and animal; or what perhaps will amount to the same thing, if we stand now upon the surface of some new made island just raising above the water of our modern seas, we may even now, study and watch these things, for the forces and powers of nature then and now were the same. A more important, or interesting subject for the agriculturalist cannot be found: For in these mineral compounds, formed with so much care, we find wrapped up the elements, the very material that

is to enter into vegetable and animal life. Indeed we find also, imprisoned in these compounds, some of the forces that are to play an important part in reducing them to soil, and then elevating this matter into organized forms.

Beautiful indeed, we are ready to say, as we stand upon the surface of this newly-risen rock, this crystalline aggregate of finely finished minerals, and watch the bright rays of the sun as they fall for the first time upon its light-reflecting crystals. At this point let us dwell for a momeut, for it is here where our study of minerology ends, and where we must begin with the elements of organography.

The surface of this rock is now clear above the waters, and fully up in the region of atmospheric air, sunlight and other physical conditions unknown in the mineral kingdom. These new forces commence at once to play upon its crystalline structure, and changes are already visible. The crystalline faces of the minerals composing this rock, once bright and beautiful, are growing dim. The work of disintegration has begun. The elements and atoms forming those beautiful crystals in the mineral kingdom, under the influence of her laws, are now freed from their bond of union, and upon this once hard crystalline rock they lie mechanically mixed in common dust. This little film of dust, so thin that we can remove it with our finger, is soil in its first stages of formation.

Slowly, but effectually, these forces work; and slowly but gradually this little film of dust thickens on the surface of the rock. If here we watch this process carefully, we notice that not only upon the hard crystalline rock, but upon the dust itself are these forces at work, reducing it to states of finer division, until particle by particle it passes beyond the range of vision, and is held in solution by the water imprisoned in this disintegrated rock, this new-made earth.

By this process, those beautiful compounds, the work of the mineral kingdom are destroyed, completely destroyed, as though they were made in vain. The material, however, is not lost, but removed -as men of science tell us-to the region of molecular forces, where it will undergo molecular changes, and may be returned to us in new forms.

In this stage in "Nature's Methods" let us pause and consider for a moment some of the facts brought to light by modern science. It has been known to the world for many years that matter is

indestructable; that is, its forms may change, and by certain processes be rendered invisible. But it is matter still, and subject to the forces and laws of the material world. This is true not only in one department of nature, but in all those crystalline compounds that we have just been considering, passing as they are into decay and dust, and returning again in new forms somewhere; it may be in new mineral compounds, or it may be in vegetable forms, and subsequently in animal forms. Then forms of matter will always depend upon the nature of the forces, and physical conditions under which matter is placed.

Modern science has just given to the world the fact, that what is true of matter in this respect, is true also of natural forces. Now, if this doctrine of the conservation and correlation of natural forces is true, we must have the following facts in connection with the formation and disentegration of the rocks under consideration:

1. The chemical forces employed in the mineral kingdom in building these compounds and holding them in the massive rock were not destroyod but imprisoned for the time being in the minerals and rocks which they were instrumental in building up and withdrawn from the active forces of the world only while these minerals and rocks maintained their forms.

2. In the disintegration of these rocks and decomposition of these minerals, these imprisoned forces are to be released and restored to the active forces of the world, as the work of disintegration and decomposition goes on.

With this view of the subject, this little film of dust or soil rises before us as a question of great interest; for it is not only the ashes of decaying minerals, but the abode of forces just freed from their prisons, restored fresh to the world to play an important part in the transformation of this dissolving matter into new material forms. Nor is this all; the forces employed in disintegrating this rock and decomposing these minerals, atmospheric air, for instance and water, with what other forces and matter they may contain, are also employed in building up this soil-formation, consequently are improved in the work which they are instrumental in building up, until released again in other forms as plant-food and plant-forces to be used in building up vegetable forms of matter. The soil, then, like the plant and the animal, is a department in nature's work-shop where the transformation of matter and forces is carried on, not by