Backyard Beekeeping
Beekeeping in the CityÂ
THE joys of backyard beekeeping are yearly being experienced by more and more city dwellers. What can add more prestige to the informal private area than a neat row of white hives with their industrious inhabitants arriving heavy laden with nectar and pollen to be converted into “bee-bread” for the pearly larvae? What study more fascinating than the life of the colony, that example of perfect social organization where not one single individual who labors so tirelessly during the long summer days storing the nectar from myriads of blossoms lives to reap the harvest of her labors? What wonders of nature await the tired business man who, after work is over, hurries eagerly home to take up veil and smoker and visit for a while with the tiny tenants of his backyard apiary? What thrill of pleasure when he first sits down to, taste the fragrant sweetness of crisp brown waffles swimming in honey fresh from his own bee hives!
As a food, honey is perhaps the least appreciated of nature’s gifts to man. A concentrated carbohydrate whose seventy-five percent content of invert sugars is assimilated by the human stomach immediately and completely, it contains two valuable vitamins, appreciable quantities of mineral salts, and 1,785 calories of easily liberated heat and energy per pound. Being in a form for direct assimilation, it causes no work for the digestive organs and is therefore safe for the most delicate stomachs. It is recommended by physicians as a milk modifier for infants, a sweet for children, and in many instances as a safe sugar in diabetic cases. It is non-fattening, stimulating to the vital processes, and has been proved by carefully conducted experiments to be a medium “in which practically none of the bacteria of known human diseases can exist.” And yet this wholesome flower-flavored sweet of nature’s own production rarely finds its way to the average American table, a fact truly to be regretted.
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