February 11, 1889. ) 



JOUENAL OF HOKTIOULTOBE AND COTTAGE SARDENEB. 



117 



are considerable, for a pair of tUom last year I know wore sold 

 for X.'20, and it is not an uncommon occurrence to sell tliem for 

 large sums. — G. J. Barnsby, Derby. 



(To bo coDtiuued.) 



FOUL BROOD. 



I nEfliiET to see that my friend, Mr. Lowe, in a well-written 

 and otherwise unobjeetionablo paper on foul brood, refers to 

 the controversy wbicli five years ago raged between us on the 

 subject of this disease in such a manner as compels me, in 

 spite of my reluctance to stir up tho ashes of an old dispute, 

 briefly to re-state the points then at issue between us, as well 

 as the manner in which the discussion began and ended. 



Towards the end of July and in the early part of August, 

 1863, throe articles from my pen descriptive of the ravages of 

 foul brood in my apiary, together with tho means by which I 

 at first vainly attempted its cure, and the mode by which I 

 ultimately succeeded in eradicating it, appeared in the pages of 

 " our Journal." These were promptly met by counter-state- 

 ments from Mr. Lowe, in which he actually ignored my evi- 

 dence of what had occurred in my own apiary, would pay no 

 heed to my declaration that I had introduced the disease by 

 the unwitting use of infested combs taken from a common 

 straw hive, but insisted upon it that I had in point of fact 

 created what I wrongly designated a disease, and had brought 

 the evil upon myself by meddling and ill-judged manipulations 

 — whilst at the same time he held my modes of management, 

 the fancied disease which he said they had produced, and the 

 means by which I professed to have cured it, as being all 

 equally illusory and delusive, and worthy only of derision and 

 contempt. 



In support of these views he asserted : — 



First, That chilled brood is not removed by bees, but that 

 wherever it occurs there it must remain, and that unless re- 

 moved by the apiarian, it must inevitably become what I had 

 termed foul brood. 



Second, That foul brood is not a disease, is neither in- 

 fectious nor contagious, and can be at once radically cured by 

 simply excising those parts of the combs which contain decayed 

 and abortive brood. 



Third, That it is only in the hands of the experimentalist 

 that foul brood becomes general. 



These views were upheld by Mr. Lowe with much ability and 

 tenacity against myself and most of the leading apiarian contri- 

 butors to " our Journal " for more than six months, until he was 

 refuted on every point by such irrefragable evidence, that it 

 at last became too strong even for him, and finally in the num- 

 ber for the '2'2ud March, 18l!4, he announced that he was not 

 in a position to add anything material to what he had said 

 upon the subject, and admitted that the testimony of his ad- 

 versaries was calculated to produce a strong impression and to 

 stimulate inquiry and investigation. 



It is with the utmost reluctance that I have entered upon 

 these particulars; but it must be remembered that it ia 

 nownearly live years since the controversy closed, and that a new 

 generation of readers has sprung up in the meantime, to 

 whom the facts of the case are necessarily unknown, whilst 

 they are by no means fresh in the recollection of old ones. 

 All these, therefore, who have perused Mr. Lowe's recent 

 article would probably receive the erroneous impression that he, 

 when advocating the truth in respect of foul brood, had been 

 overborne by popular clamour, and that, outnumbered but in 

 no respect refuted, he could still under his unmerited defeat 

 fairly console himself with the maxim, " Ulagna est Veritas, ct 

 prctvalebit." 



After very carefully perusing and reperusing Mr. Lowe's last 

 paper, I confess to being unable to comprehend exactly what 

 are his present views on the subject of foul brood. If he con- 

 ceives that he advocated only the truth in 1863 and 1864, then 

 he. must believe that what he at that time advanced as true is 

 equally true now, and in that case I shall at once decline to re- 

 open the controversy. It, on the other hand, he is disposed 

 carefully to investigate the subject of the origin of foul brood, 

 and seek earnestly for the truth wherever it may be found, he 

 has my warmest wishes for his success, and is welcome to my 

 best assistance in attaining it. 



First, then, with regard to his idea that "virulent foul brood 

 seems, comparatively speaking, a malady of recent years." I 

 may remark that the Ahb6 della Rocca describes an epidemical 

 disease which from 1777 to 1780, attacked the hives in the 

 island of Syros, in the Archipelago, and was very near an. 



nihilating all the bees. This disease he attributed entirely to 

 infected combs, or to the brood being placed in tho cells in an 

 inverted manner. Aristotle also, after giving a perfectly ac- 

 curate description of tho ravages of the wax moth, speaks of a 

 disease which produces a certain kind of laziness among tha 

 bees, and is attended by a disgusting smell of the hives. As 

 these symptoms are not manifested until tho malady has nearly 

 run its course and approaches a fatal termination, it appears 

 that virulent foul brood was common more than two thousand 

 years ago ! 



Any one who can refer to tho numbar of " our Journal," 

 issued on the 17th November, 1803, may see that I therein 

 stated that an instance had been brought under my notice by 

 a valued correspondent in the North, which countenanced the 

 suspicion that an overwhelming quantity of chilled brood 

 might, under exceptional circumstances, degenerate into actual 

 foul brood, just as an ordinary cold in the human subject may 

 occasionally, although rarely, be developed into malignant 

 fever. This, then, is the course which I think inquiry should 

 take : Does chilled brood from a perfectly licaltlii/ stock ever 

 degenerate into foul brood, and if so, under what conditions 

 and circumstances '? I myself believe that if the brood of a hive 

 which is labouring under what I may term the chronic form 

 of foul brood be chilled, the disease is likely to assume in- 

 creased intensity, and may pass at once into tho active and 

 virulent stage, and this I fancy was the case in the instance re- 

 lated by the Baron von Berlepsch ; but 1 have myself never yet 

 met with a .case in which chilled brood, if perfectly healthy, 

 has passed into that stage of infectious decomposition which 

 we now call foul brood. In support of this statement, I will 

 briefly refer to two additional instances which have come under 

 my own direct observation since the conclusion of the foul- 

 brood controversy. 



The first came under my notice during the summer of 1865, 

 and was referred to by me in the number of " our Journal " 

 issued on the 20th of June in that year. An apiarian friend 

 added brood too rapidly to a nucleus or small artificial swarm, 

 the consequence was, that much of it became chilled, and when 

 I saw it appeared in various stages of decomposition. At my 

 especial request my friend kindly consented to permit matters 

 to remain as they were, with the view of ascertaining whether 

 foul brood would or would not be the result. I found afterwards 

 that all the chilled brood was ultimately removed by the bees, 

 and that no permanent ill effects followed. 



The second case occurred in my own apiary. On the 12th of 

 June, 1866, I sent a stock of Ligurians to Mr. Pettitt, of Dover, 

 the combs of which fell during their transit by railway. Al- 

 though I begged him to return the bees at once, I did not get 

 them back until eleven daijs afterwards, when they were accom- 

 panied by their brood combs packed in a separate lio.v '. Of 

 course, all were hopelessly and irremediably chilled ; but worker 

 combs were at that time too scarce with me to be lightly thrown 

 aside, so I forthwith hitched them up to bars, and put them 

 into a couple of my strongest stocks, the bees of which speedily 

 repaired and cleared out the cells, and they were forthwith 

 bred in without any evil result whatever. 



Of over-heating I have met with but one instance, which 

 happened so long ago as July, 1859, when I was weak enough 

 to exhibit a couple of observatory hives at one of our local 

 flower shows. The committee insisted on the bees being con- 

 fined, which resulted in serious injury to one stock, and the 

 entire destruction of the other, through the softening and 

 falling of the combs, which became literally scalding hot. 

 Putting these fallen combs into another stock, I had the morti- 

 fication of finding all the young bees turned out of the hive as 

 fast as they were hatched, owing to their wings being shrivelled 

 np by the excessive heat to Vfhich they had been exposed. Still 

 this was the extent of the injury, and no symptoms of foul brood 

 appeared. 



These, then, being the results of my own experience with 

 both chilled and over-heated brood when previously in a per- 

 fectly healthy condition, I may, perhaps, be excused for asking 

 for more convincing evidence than has yet been laid before me, 

 before I can hold it as proved that either of these causes is 

 sufficient to develope that fearful malady which we denominate 

 foul brood, except in cases where infection has previously ex- 

 isted. — A Devonshire Bee-kebpeb. 



In order to assist those who are willing to investigate scientifi- 

 cally the nature of foul brood, I here submit for their guidance 

 the following particulars which may materially assist them : — 

 First, I may mention that when I recommended baking in an 



