There is opportunity for those who wish to take up some problem relating to apiculture as a subject of investigation, and the agricultural colleges and experiment stations will no doubt in the future give more and more attention to the investigation of problems related to this interesting and profitable pursuit. ARTHUR H. MCCRAY VIII RAISING SILKWORMS Although silkworms are not actually reared in the open air, there is so much outdoor work and moderate exercise connected with their care that the subject may properly be included in a book on outdoor work. The best food for silkworms is the leaf of the white mulberry. If you have already a hedge of this or several trees you can begin at once. If not, several years must elapse while you raise your preliminary crop of mulberry trees from seeds or cuttings. It is useless to buy silkworm eggs if you have not the wherewithal to feed your infant caterpillars. You may not think of going into silkworm rearing in a commercial way but only as an interesting bit of nature study. Why not make up some neat attractive cases, each containing a little collection illustrating the four stages of the growth of this insect? Heat a few eggs to destroy life, then glue them to a card; preserve a caterpillar in a vial of alcohol; glue a cocoon to a card; pin and spread two of the moths, a male and a female, and pin them into the box. From such a box school children will get a far more definite idea of insect metamorphosis than they will ever get from a book on zoölogy. Such little collections ought to sell well in schools where nature study, zoölogy, or agriculture is taught. The mulberry silkworm makes the best silk, although it is by no means the only silk-spinning insect. Every now and then we read of some one who is experimenting with the silk of our American or giant silkworms, the _Promethea_ or the _Cecropia_, or with the silk spun by spiders. But none as yet compares with _Bombyx mori_ in either quantity or quality of its product or in ease of rearing or in reeling of the silk.