not fed at all! The inexperienced Apiarian has
thus often made a worse use of his honey than he would have done, if he
had actually thrown it away! while all the time, he is deluding himself
with the vain expectation of reaping some wonderful profits, from what
he considers an improved mode of managing bees.

Such conduct in its results, appears to me very much like the noxious
influences under which too many of the children of the rich are so
fatally reared. With every want gratified, pampered and fed to the very
full, how often do we see them disappoint all the fond expectations of
parents and friends, their money proving only a curse, while not
unfrequently beggared in purse, and bankrupt in character, they
prematurely sink to an ignoble or dishonored grave. Think of it, ye who
are slaving in the service of Mammon, that ye may leave to your sons,
the overgrown wealth which usually proves a legacy of withering curses,
while you neglect to train them up in those habits of stern morality and
steady industry, and noble self-reliance, without which the wealth of
Croesus would be but a despicable portion! Think of it, as you
contrast its results in the bitter experience of thousands, with the
happier influences under which so many of our noblest men in Church and
State, have been nurtured and developed, and then pursue your sordid
policy, if you can. "There is that withholdeth" from good objects, "more
than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty:" yes, to poverty of Christian
virtue and manliness, and of those "treasures" which we are all
entreated by God himself, to "lay up" in the store-house of Heaven. Call
your narrow-mindedness and gross deficiencies in Christian liberality,
nothing more than a natural love of your children, and an earnest desire
to provide for your own household. Little fear there may be that _you_
will ever incur the charge of being "worse than an infidel" on this
point; but lay not on this account, any flattering unction to your
souls; look within, and see if the base idolatry of gold has not more to
do with your whole course of thinking and acting, than any love of wife
or children, relatives or friends!

Another _sermon_! does some one exclaim? Would then that it might be to
some of my readers a sermon indeed; "a word fitly spoken," "like apples
of gold in pictures of silver."

The prudent Apiarian will always regard the feeding of bees, except the
little, given to them by way of encouragement, as