614 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



TREATMENT OF DISEASE. 



EinVARD G. BROWN, SAEGEANTS BLUFF. 



My experience has been limited to sac brood and foul brood; the ropy 

 kind that leaves one with a dark-brown taste in his mental vision and 

 a raw chill around the bones of his financial constitution. 



Of course, we all know what it is; simrpiy a disease of the larvae which 

 causes it to turn to a ropy, dark-brown mass. But how many actually 

 know what it looks like in the first stages? When there are only a few 

 cells, possibly ten or twelve in a hive — the time when you can do the 

 most effective work of checking and eradicating it? 



I had an apiary system of about 500 colonies well salted before I woke 

 up. I know a man who had written several articles on bee culture and 

 who was always preaching the dangers of the disease, who took a one- 

 frame observatory exhibit to the state fair, and when a man who had had 

 considerable experience with the disease asked him if it was an exhibit of 

 foul brood, he said he did not know that he had any in his apiary; but 

 there were 25 or 30 infected cells on that comb and when they went to 

 look over his apiary, they found a fair start all through the yard. 



Judging from the articles in the bee journals Dr. Miller had things well 

 infected and in the advanced stages before he knew it was there. 



Now my advice is: first get acquainted and that, not for the love of it 

 but because an enemy loses half his power if his tactics are well known. 



When I say get acquainted, I do not mean by reading and talking about 

 it or seeing an old dried-up sample, but by seeing a real, fresh, live case 

 in the first stages and preferably not in your own yard, but in some of 

 your unfortunate neighbors' and God grant, for your sake, that that 

 neighbor be quite a distant one, too. If you are interested in bees to any 

 extent it will pay you to go a hundred miles or more if necessary to 

 get this introduction. 



If a man can locate the first traces of infection in the first cases in 

 his yard, he can control it much easier than when it has reached the 

 advanced stages and his financial loss will be much less. 



It is not the dark-brown, dried-up scale we want to know, but the light- 

 brown, almost cream-colored, the just collapsed larva that we must know, 

 and nothing fits us for its detection like actual contact and a little friendly 

 advice from an afflicted neighbor. 



The essential points in treatment are: to remove all the honey and old 

 combs from the infected colonies and to do so in such a way and at such 

 a time that no other bees will come in contact with it and in this way 

 carry it to other colonies, and to accomplish this it is imperative that the 

 utmost care be exercised. , 



It is best to do the work when there is a good natural honey fiow 

 on, and for my part I would not attempt treatment under but one other 



