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stock, and died out early iu October without yielding any stage of Nosema. 

 No. III. got a frame of sealed brood from a badly infected stock, and survived 

 till 30th October (longer than either of the controls). A small proportion of 

 the bees gave "young stages" of Nosema. No. IV. was fed on syrup con- 

 taining numerous old spores. The bees were doing well on 8th December, 

 but were dead by the middle of February. The hive was much soiled with 

 dysenteric material in which Nosema spores were plentiful. Bees from an 

 infected hive were introduced into No. V., and this stock died out on 12th 

 October, without any evidence of infection with Nosema. These experiments 

 were quite inconclusive. We have no proof that any of the bees suffered 

 from Isle of Wight Disease at all, and it is again apparent that the Nosema 

 infection did not appreciably hasten the death of the bees. Indeed the stock 

 shown to have the heaviest Nosema infection lived longest of all. 



The difficulties of the observers are obvious. They were afraid to infect a 

 stock living under natural conditions lest they should spread the disease, so 

 they were compelled to experiment on bees in confinement. We get little 

 glimpses of the behaviour of the bees, and these indicate the very unnatural 

 condition to which they were reduced : " The bees roamed round the windows 

 during the first day or two, and many died. . . . The queen gradually ceased 

 to lay. . . . The bees became listless, and many failed to return to the hive at 

 night. . . . The bees did not appear to be interested in anything." In 1912 

 further experiments on full stocks of confined bees were attempted, but with 

 equally disappointing results, and the account concludes with the remark : 

 " It was found that even in winter bees cannot be kept satisfactorily in such 

 compartments" (Report of 1913, p. 25). 



In view of this difficulty, it occurred to me that in Lewis we had a very 

 convenient area for further experiments on bee disease. There were no hive 

 bees on the Island when I brought in the first stock in May 1909, and the 

 history of each stock subsequently introduced was known to me. Further, it 

 would be easy to carry out experiments on full colonies of bees living under 

 natural conditions, and yet so far apart that no cross-infection could occur. 

 In the spring of 1914 a Government grant for the investigation of bee disease 

 became available through the Natural History Department of the University 

 of Aberdeen. From that time I have been associated with Dr Eennie of the 

 Natural History Department in carrying out further observations and experi- 

 ments in Lewis and elsewhere. The results of these joint researches, along 

 with many observations previously made by me in Lewis, of which a careful 

 journal was kept, are dealt with in the paper by Dr Eennie and myself in the 

 present volume of the Proceedings. 



