When I was a child one of the most interesting things every summer was to watch my uncle smoke his bees. He had ten hives and he thought he ought to have some honey. But the bees wanted it themselves, and for this reason they were ready to sting him whenever he came to get it,—even as your father would shoot any burglar who came to rob him.

But my uncle knew a way to manage. He took a pipe, filled it with tobacco, and smoked it into each hive. At first the bees were excited and flew around as a man might do if his house were on fire. Nevertheless they had to breathe smoke instead of pure air, and it soon made them so dull that they could not fly and could not even sting. They stood still, or walked around slowly, and my uncle brushed them from one place to another and took as much honey as he wanted.

When the air in the hive became pure again the bees felt better and hurried off to visit the flowers. They wanted to get honey enough to fill their little barns again so as not to be hungry in the winter.

That story is just to show what tobacco smoke does for bees. It makes them rather stupid for a while, but it does not kill them.

Here is another story.

The other day I went to see a friend of mine who has a greenhouse. Everything was growing well, and I said, "But how do you manage to keep off the bugs and the worms?"

"Ah!" said he; "tobacco smoke does it." This surprised me, until he showed me great bundles of stems of tobacco leaves that looked like small twigs. He said he bought a ton of the stuff at a time. He also told me that the soft part of each leaf is used for chewing tobacco, for pipe tobacco, and for cigars, but that the stems are saved for greenhouses all over the country. It seems that once every two weeks he himself uses these stems for small bonfires up and down all the straight rows of his greenhouse.

He takes an armful for each fire, spreads it out a little on the ground, lights it, and shuts every door and window to keep the smoke in.

After a while the room is so full of smoke that he cannot stay in it a minute himself because it makes him deathly sick. But the bugs and the worms have shorter legs; they cannot run away. When, therefore, the stuff is burned up and the fires have smoked out, and the man goes in again, he generally finds the insects all dead. If some are alive, he gives them another big smoke the next day, and they never live to eat any more. Smoke from an ordinary bonfire would not do this.

Both of these stories show what tobacco smoke does for insects. But it is more important for you and me to know whether it can do us any harm. I met a man the other day who used to smoke sweet fern and grapevine stems when he was a young boy. He says smoking was great fun in those days and that it never made him sick, until once when he thought he would try a real cigar. He then took his pennies, bought the biggest cigar he could find, lighted it, and smoked about half an inch. He said he was so sick for five hours afterwards that he thought he was going to die. He went into the barn, lay down on the hay, and wished he could be a cow and not suffer so. When his father found him he felt better, but after that he never wanted to smoke again.

It is the poison in tobacco smoke that makes it so different from any other kind of smoke. It is this that made the boy sick when he tried to smoke the cigar, and it is this that killed the insects.

In another case the boy was not to blame. He was three years old and had a father who was a great smoker. This man played with his son, petted him, held him in his lap, and often they slept together; but he also noticed that whenever he stayed at home for several weeks his son grew pale and weak and did not care to eat. Later he noticed again that when he went out of town and stayed away from home for a good while the boy grew merry and strong and as well as ever. This seemed so strange that he asked the doctor about it. Without any hesitation the wise man told him that the trouble all came from the smoke of the tobacco that he used. He said the boy could not get well unless the father stopped smoking, or unless he went away from home and stayed away. This put the matter so clearly, and the man loved his son so much, that he stopped smoking at once and the boy got well. From that time on he stayed well, and even the father himself was in better health.

If you should walk through a train of cars with your eyes shut, you would know the smoking car by its smell. Indeed, the odor of the tobacco smoke is so strong that even if no one had smoked in that car for weeks, the smell would remain and tell the story. It is also so disagreeable to some people that men who are traveling, and wish to smoke, have to do it in a car by themselves, for even the smell of the smoke sometimes makes women and children car-sick when they travel.

Albert S. Lyons

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