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Show liiL) i5aliiic tiHt) h kilii&Wbem b Im U. Q. I 6 fsX it x V i ! -5 They Help Make Planes, Guns, Medicines, and Also Aid the Farmer. The house of the honey bee has gone to war. Crushed, melted and acid treated, the beeswax that built this fragile miracle of architecture is at work in munitions factories, airplane fabrication fab-rication plants and in laboratories where white-coated technicians are compounding medicines for the bat-tlefrunt. bat-tlefrunt. As "civilians," American bees produced almost four million pounds of valuable wax annually. Patriotic beekeepers are now studying wartime war-time methods to speed up production and conserve all that the hives yield. Experts in the department of agriculture agri-culture are aiding bee owners by research and experimentation, and encouraging amateurs with a natural natu-ral interest in the honey gatherers to enter beekeeping in a modest way. War uses could absorb an unesti-mated unesti-mated additional supply of beeswax. It is a tested weather-proof coating coat-ing for munitions and other ordnance ord-nance awaiting shipment to far-flung battle lines. In medical laboratories more and more of the unique substance sub-stance is being employed in healing heal-ing and protective ointments. Airplanes Air-planes and bombers need beeswax in important and, at present, secret construction uses. Civilians fighting on the home front have reason to thank the bees, too. Last year the nation's sugar ration ra-tion was supplemented by more than 200 million pounds of honey. Help Increase Yields. As field bees search for blossom Always industrious, the busy bees are pitching into the war program with all the zeal of the most enthusiastic enthusi-astic plant worker. Their amazing results are being felt on the homefront and battlefront with new and old products described in the adjoining story. nectar to be turned into "liquid sweetness" by the hive bees, they perform the greatest of their war services greater even than the colony's col-ony's contribution in safeguarding weapons of war. From blossom to blossom the tiny workers carry pollens pol-lens that speed the productive processes proc-esses of plants. For the farmer, this means an increase in the yield of more than 35 orchard, garden and nut crops soldiers and civilians eat, a dozen or more of the grass and clover crops livestock feed on, and the fiber crops that go into clothing. Daily their work is making possible the 70 million pounds of seed a war depleted agriculture must have in 1943. Insects help is necessary to effect ef-fect pollination of many species of plants that otherwise would not seed or produce fruit, no matter how well they were cultivated, fertilized and protected from diseases and pests. Most important of the pollinating insects, the honey bee lives in mobile mo-bile colony homes easy to transfer where required in the program of producing food, seed and armament for war. Farmers, scholars and city folk for centuries have watched and wondered won-dered as the bee went his industrious industri-ous way. Ancient poets praised the honey of the bees on Greece's Mount Hymettus. On sacred altars all over the world today, none of the substances man has compounded burns more stead-. ily or brightly in the candle of hope and prayer for the soldier than the taper moulded from the soft, flower-white flower-white wax the bee gives to mankind. |