If you do not live in the immediate vicinity, say five or six miles, from a sugar-plantation, by all means keep bees. This can be rendered one of the most productive branches of business of the day. Procure a few swarms at first, and they will soon multiply to any extent required. Use sections of hollow logs, four or five feet long, for hives, if you have no other more convenient materials to make them of, and allow the bees to work over the honey a second time, that you may avoid the injurious effects in eating honey which may have been gathered from poisonous flowers. If the above-named class of hives be used, there will be no necessity for killing the bees; for when the hives are filled with honey, they can be removed without harm from the end opposite to that in which the bees are at work, and they will immediately go to work and fill the vacancy. In most parts of the Southern States bees maybe kept at work during the winter. If there are not flowers for them, they can be made to work over the bad honey collected the season before.
This is also a busy month for the sugar-planter. He will be active in cutting and carting his cane with all possible despatch; and he should employ one or more practical and intelligent men to conduct the operations of the mill. In the manufacture of sugar, we know of no better method than that given by Professor Mapes in a letter to Hon. H. L. Ellsworth, from which we make the following extract:--
1. To cut the cane as ripe as possible, but before any acetic acid is formed; litmus paper, touched to the fresh-cut cane, will turn red if acid.
2. Express the juice without loss of time, as every moment after cutting will deteriorate its quality.
3. A small quantity of clear lime-water, say one quart to a hundred gallons of juice, should be added the moment it is expressed, unless the juice shows acidity with litmus paper; in that case, no lime should be used, but a solution of sal-soda or soda ash should be added, until it is precisely neutral.
4. When the juice is neutral, free from excess of acid or alkali, it should be evaporated in such an apparatus as would finish its charge in 30 minutes; if the boiling power is too small, good crystallization can not possibly be obtained.