Feb. 13, 1902. 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



101 



I The Buffalo Convention. I 



f5 Report of the Proceeding's of the Thirty-Second Annual fr 



i^ Convention of the National Bee-Keepers' Asso- ^ 



=5 ciation, held at Buffalo, New York, S^■ 



1$ Sept. 10, 11 and 12, 1901. ^ 



(Ci)titiiuictl from patre -.>. 



The Relation of Bees to the Orchard. 



I will discuss the subject, under three 

 heads : 



First, Bees and the nionilia fungus ; 



Second, Bees and pear-blipht. 



Third, Bees as pollenizers. 



Bees are certainly intimately con- 

 nected with the orchard, both in health 

 and disease. Taking: up the first sub- 

 ject, I think I can give you something- 

 new. It is probably the least impor- 

 tant of the three matters which I shall 

 take up, but it is the newest. I am 

 quite well satisfied from observations 

 made during the early part of the pres- 

 ent summer that bees are largely re- 

 sponsible for the rapid distribution of 

 the peach and plum rot fungus. They 

 are not the only culprits connected 

 with that distribution. Wasps and 

 soldier-bugs and several other punctur- 

 ing insects are also concerned in the 

 matter,and the wasps and the punctur- 

 ing insects the ones which usually 

 make the openings, especially in per- 

 fectly sound fruit. However, bees 

 rapidly follow in the punctures by 

 other insects. In June and July hun- 

 dreds and thousands of bees may be 

 seen swarming over the early-ripening 

 peaches and Japanese plums, and in 

 going over rotten fruit they carry the 

 spores into the wounds made by the 

 wasps and soldier-bugs, and into 

 weather-cracks. The peaches cracked 

 open badly by the wet weather this 

 year. Oldmixon was the worst in 

 Maryland, but even varieties like El- 

 berta make a great manj* weather- 

 cracks. Into these cracks the bees 

 penetrated. They even ate large holes 

 in the fruit. I liave seen a hole large 

 enough to hold three bees inside of it, 

 and even on gathering the fruit, they 

 were so busily engaged that they were 

 still at work inside the hole. 



I have endeavored to follow up this 

 subject a little more closely, and tried 

 to find out how much the monilia fun- 

 gus could spread without the aid of 

 bees, and investigation showed that it 

 was able to spread witliout the aid of 

 insects ; in other words, it does blow 

 by the wind, and gets about in that 

 way. I covered trees with mosquito- 

 netting, and also branches, and thought 

 perhaps I might be able to prevent the 

 spread of monilia with mosquito-net 

 protection, but was not able to do so 

 entirely. I somewhat reduced it, how- 

 ever, showing that the bees are active 

 agents in the distribution of monilia. 



Taking up the second subject of bees 

 and pear-blight, we may say that bees 

 are very active agents in the distribu- 

 tion of pear-blight. In order to under- 

 stand fully, however, the exact part 

 that bees do play in the distribution of 

 pear-blight, it will be necessary to go 



very briefly over some other points 

 concerning this disease, and to give, 

 in fact, the life-history of the pear- 

 blight bacillus through the year. 



In the first place, we have three 

 methods by which the pear-blight germ 

 enters the tree: First, through the 

 blossoms, resulting in what is com- 

 monly called blossom-blight, to distin- 

 guish it from the other methods of 

 communication of the disease; second, 

 through the tender tips of growing 

 twigs ; but either blossom-blight or 

 twig-blight may run down on the limbs 

 and trunk ; and, third, blight may 

 enter directly into the fleshy bark of 

 young trees. 



The latter is comparatively a rare 

 method, in fact by far the greater num- 

 ber of infections are directly through 

 the blossom. 



Now, of course, it is only in blossom- 

 blight that the honey-bee is concerned, 

 and furthermore, all insects which 

 visit the pear and apple blossoms and 

 quince blossoms are more or less con- 

 cerned in the matter of distribution on 

 the blossoms. I may say also that other 

 insects than the honey-bee are largely 

 instrumental in the distribution of 

 pear-blight on the twigs, and we liave 

 scarcely been able to find a direct, nor- 

 mal method of introduction of the dis- 

 ease in the twigs without the introduc- 

 tion of some mechanical or insect punc- 

 ture. Beginning with the spring of 

 the year, the disease breaks out on the 

 blossoms. Ordinarily, trees do no t 

 have the blight very badly until they 

 come into bloom, and this, as I said be- 

 fore, is mostly due to its distribution 

 by bees and other insects which visit 

 the flowers and are the main factors. 

 The pear-blossom is a very open one 

 and is very extensively visited by a 

 whole list of insects. I started out to 

 get a list of insects which visit pear- 

 blossoms, but when I reached the num- 

 ber of forty, I gave it up. Nearly all 

 the flying insects — the bee being most 

 active of all, but even beetles and 

 wasps, and occasionally even a hum- 

 ming-bird (the latter of course not be- 

 ing insect) — visited the pear-blossoms 

 and carried the disease along. 



The blight begins on the blossoms 

 in early spring ; then during the sum- 

 mer we may have twig-blight clear into 

 September. The disease runs down on 

 the twigs, and in the great majority of 

 cases dies out. The disease works in 

 the bark and as a rule finds the tree, at 

 some time during the late spring and 

 summer, a little too dry and tough for 

 it to take hold of, and it dies out. Oc- 

 casionally infections, however, keep 

 running down on the twigs, get into 

 the fleshy bark, and keep on working 

 slowly till fall. After this season of 

 the year, the trees are so moist that 

 those germs will not dry out but will 



live over winter, resulting in what I 

 call " hol'1-ovcr blight." It HtandK 

 zero weather perfectly. In the spring, 

 those hold over cases start off when 

 root pressure begins and when the tree 

 is forced full of sap. In some instances 

 in the South, very active changes go 

 on in these hold-over cases during mild 

 winter weather, but in the Northern 

 States they don't have lime to do much 

 damage. The virus runs out on the 

 sides of the tree and drops down. I 

 saw some very fine cases in the moun- 

 tains of Virginia last spring. The 

 flies and wasps and other insects swarm 

 on the exuding sap, and as the blo.s- 

 soms open they fly from that to the 

 opening blossoms and start the infec- 

 tion for the next year. 



Bloom-blight, then blight running 

 on the branches, then hold-over blight, 

 then re-infection next spring on the 

 blossoms. When it is started on the 

 blossoms, it is carried like fire. Now, 

 as I started to say a moment ago, you 

 would like to have the authentic proof 

 that the bees carry pear-blight. I 

 worked long and patiently on this 

 problem forthreeor four years. In the 

 first place, the great abundance of 

 blossom-blight leads to a suspicion, at 

 least, that we have here some normal, 

 effective method of distribution. There 

 is some regular way about it, and we 

 shall see what that method is. In the 

 second place, the disease begins in the 

 nectaries. The germs of the pear- 

 blight are found growing and multi- 

 plying in this nectar. I determined 

 this mostly by artificial infection. By 

 taking pure cultures of the pear-blight 

 germ and touching the nectary with a 

 camel's hair brush, I started the pear- 

 blight oif. It requires no puncture. It 

 is the only point on the tree where the 

 germs enter normally without a punc- 

 ture. The nectar has no shield or cuti- 

 cle over it to keep out the germs. 



Now my first acquaintance with this 

 relationship of bees to pear-blight 

 came about something like this : When 

 I had succeeded in isolating the pear- 

 blight germ, I immediately tested the 

 validity of my cultures by a series of 

 experiments with a camel's-hair brush 

 on some blossoms, and I inoculated 

 and labeled a number of blossoms 

 around the lower part of a pear-tree on 

 the Agrictural Department grounds at 

 Washington. I spent a good deal of 

 time actually watching those blossoms 

 growing, and of course here came the 

 bees right in front of me, and as the 

 germs began to grow in the nectaries, 

 they began to visit my infected blos- 

 soms, and I saw thera fly from these 

 over the trees to the other blossoms. I 

 captured two bees, caught them in the 

 act of visiting the infected blossoms, 

 and taking them into the laboratory 

 made plate cultures by the method in 

 which we ordinarily isolate bacteria, 

 and succeeded beautifully in isolating 

 pear-blight germs from the mouth- 

 parts of the bees. 



In otlier words, we actually caught 

 the bees in the act, and this was re- 

 peated a number of times and in differ- 

 ent parts of the country. Now it seems 

 as though we had matters pretty well 

 proven. My trees that I had infected 

 came down beautifully with pear- 

 blight. The clusters all came down 

 which I had infected and labeled, and 

 a large number of others all around the 

 tree. 



The question then was as to what 



