For the class of small-holders that must now multiply throughout the length and breadth of the land, there is awaiting an enterprise—a source of livelihood—as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads an easy life while his factory hands toil for him. But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the universal want of a thing stimulates its production. One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, and cheap supply of honey; and when this is forthcoming there will be little fear but that the present demand will increase hand over hand. There are many reasons why the people should choose honey for their principal food rather than the beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored sweet, while in the manufacture of ordinary sugar the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be artificially fed, and common grocers’ sugar is used for the purpose, the result is generally that half the stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity is not the chief reason why honey should be the universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted into what is chemically known as grape-sugar; and thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part of digestion is already effected before it leaves the comb. This explains why so many delicate people, and particularly children, can assimilate food sweetened with honey, when they can take no other form of sweet.