1894 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



871 



over and over again in print, that tlie bark of 

 sassafras root would keep worms out of dried 

 fruit, and living, at the time, in Southern Xew 

 Jersey, where sassafras is, to say the least, 

 abundant, I determined to try it. Having care- 

 fully picked over the fruit, heated it again in 

 the oven, and divided it into two separate lots, 

 into one I put sassafras bark, mixing it through 

 the fruit here and there; but into the other I 

 did not put any. To all appearances both lots 

 were exactly alike when I put them away as 

 carefully as before. The one with the bark in 

 it remained perfectly free from worms until 

 all used; but the other lot, in a little while, 

 became infested again, and was finally destroy- 

 ed. Since then I have repeatedly used sassa- 

 fras bark, and think 1 am safe in saying that 

 the little moth that lays the eggs from which 

 the worms come will not go where sassafras is. 

 Now, since I have been a Gleanings reader, 

 and have seen so much about the troublesome 

 worms in honey-comb, I have wondered if there 

 could not be a way devised to use it to advan- 

 tage in protecting comb from the visits of the 

 bee-moth. Since my experiment with the fruit 

 I have come to live where it is not easy to ob- 

 tain sassafras bark, so I now use the oil, which 

 is cheap, and to be had at all drugstores. I 

 know bees do not dislike the odor of the oil, 

 because, two years ago, we put it on a hive in 

 various places, front and back, to drive out 

 large ants that were troubling one colony, and 

 the bees paid no attention to it. Large ants 

 seem to have a great aversion to it, and I have 

 three times, in the last ten years, routed them 

 from my pantry and kitchen cupboard with it. 

 Little red ants, and small black ones too. flee 

 from it. If the little red ants that are some- 

 times so troublesome make their appearance, 

 I droj) a little sassafras oil on bits of muslin, 

 and lay it wherever they are, and they leave. 

 Cinnamon oil. or ground cinnamon, if it is pure, 

 has the same etTect. 



THK KINGBIRD A DKONE-EATEK. 



I was glad to see the note in defense of the 

 kingbird in Gleanings for Oct. 1, and your 

 remarks upon it. About a year ago a writer 

 told of killing the kingbirds and redbirds be- 

 cause, as he said, they destroyed his bees, and 

 lived exclusively upon that kind of diet. I had 

 been watching those two kinds of birds for 

 some time, and had failed to see them catch a 

 single bee, even when they had every opijortu- 

 nity; and then, too, I knew that the redbirds 

 were .seef?-eaters, as we had family after family 

 of them reared in our house yard, where they 

 fed their young on melon- seeds thrown out for 

 them, and on the oats left by my daughter's 

 pet chickens. 



[Sassafras may have been before suggested 

 for the riddance of insect pests, but I do not 

 now remember of it. I should be glad to get 

 reports from others who have been similarly 

 annoyed.— Ed.] 



BEE PARALYSIS. 



A WOKSE Sf'OUUOE IN SOME LOCALITIES THAN 

 FOUL BHOOD; all curios TRIED. A.\D ALL 



A failukk; the only remedy where 



I r IS KI'IDKMIC IS complete DESTRlf- 

 TION OF THE WHOLE COLONS'. 



By T. S. Ford. 



The idea that we both had. of killing oflf the 

 black shiny bees in the hives aflFected by bee- 

 paralysis, has been thoroughly tried by me this 

 summer, and it has gone the way of the sulphur 

 and the salt, and the requeening and the sali- 

 cylic acid— the limbo of exploded remedies for 

 this disease. I can not really believe that there 

 is any cure of the disease, except spontaneous 

 ones somehow worked out by nature's own 

 processes, if it can be truthfully asserted that 

 there are cures at all. I have seen some of my 

 colonies, that were decimated in the spring, 

 apparently get well when summer came on; 

 but the shiny bees are now beginning to reap- 

 pear in them all, even among those requeened 

 with queens from the North, which I once 

 thought could resist the disease. 



In the light of what has lately been publish- 

 ed as to Cheshire's discovery of the bacillus 

 Gaytoni as being the origin of the malady, it 

 seems doubtful whether there is any hope of 

 cure. I know the infection is borne about on 

 the body of the bee itself, as I have seen an ap- 

 parently healthy queen from an infected hive 

 carry the disease into an apiary hitherto wholly 

 free from the trouble; and as I have seen the 

 malady spread from an infected hive to all 

 those close by in a short time. Now, foul brood 

 can, it appears, be eliminated, because the 

 bacillus develops only in the larvte; and when 

 the infected honey and infected combs and 

 hives are gotten rid of, and the bees put into 

 clean hives and on clean combs, the bacilli are 

 all gotten rid of. and the malady eradicated, as 

 appears from what is said of the methods of 

 treatment that have been reported as success- 

 ful. But reasoning on principle, what is to be 

 expected of a disease propagated by mere con- 

 tact, and where, after you have transferred the 

 bees to clean combs and clean hives, as I have 

 done, and fed them on sugar syrup for a while, 

 and then transferred them again, yet after all 

 there are the seeds of the disease in the shape 

 of the bacillus lurking in the body of an infect- 

 ed bee or queen, that, under favorable condi- 

 tions, propagates the infection anew? 



It seems that we need the scientist, with his 

 microscope, to take the matter in hand, and 

 hunt the bacillus down thoroughly, and tell us 

 whether the spores of this organism are pre- 

 served in the honey, and thus carried into the 

 stomachs of the larvie; also to let us know 

 whether it lurks in the combs and on the walls 

 of the hives. Then, and not till then, can the 

 disease be treated scientifically. 



But. after all, for one I utterly despair of any 



