496 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



December 



sonous material, pus, from some part 

 of the body; decayed teeth, tonsils, 

 liver, kidneys, in fact any part of the 

 body may be the cause; any "treat- 

 ment" which does not remove the 

 cause will fail of permanent results. 

 This has been demonstrated so many 

 times that it is, I believe, unques- 

 tioned. 



No matter how subject to rheuma- 

 tism an individual may be, there are 

 times when he is entirely free of pain, 

 and the last remedy he took gets cred- 

 it for the "cure." However, it is but 

 a question of time before there will 

 be another attack, when other reme- 

 dies will be used; a "patent" nostrum, 

 a "rheumatic ring" made of iron, and 

 sold at from 50 cents to $5; a horse- 

 chestnut or potato carried in the 

 pocket, hot baths, beestings, or some 

 of the "pathys." That they all fail 

 the prevalence of the disease is proof. 



But this article has to deal with the 

 beesting cure, and in this question, as 

 in all others, we must go down to 

 fundamentals. Medical men, of the 

 Traditional school, studying the mat- 

 ter, found that a treatment by a se- 

 rum to antagonize the mixed infec- 

 tion of the rheumatic poison, gave 

 good results, but was not entirely 

 safe, and the matter of a radical cure 

 of rheumatism is still an open ques- 

 tion. It is hoped that further inves- 

 tigation will develop a certain rem- 

 edy. 



Let us now see where the idea of 

 a cure by the use of beestings orig- 

 inated. Along about one hundred 

 years ago a Dr. Hahnemann, of Leip- 

 sic, conceived the idea that any drug 

 given a person which would produce 

 certain symptoms in them would cure 

 a disease which gave rise to similar 

 symptoms. "Siniilia similibus curan- 

 tur," or "like cures like"; therefore, 

 a drug which would produce a fever 

 would cure a condition of the system 

 which gave rise to fever; and a medi- 

 cine which produced a certain kind of 

 a swelling would cure a disease caus- 

 ing such a swelling; therefore, as the 

 sting of a bee caused a swelling sim- 

 ilar to swelling caused by rheuma- 

 tism, the sting of a bee would "cure" 

 rheumatism, and should, more logic- 

 ally, cure urticaria, or "hives." 



Those were the days before tiie 

 medical world found that many dis- 

 eases are caused by germs, a fact 

 which is not now contradicted, except, 

 of course, by uninformed persons. 



Not only was Dr. Hahnemann's 

 idea based on a wrong premise, but 

 his remedies were given oftimes in 

 infinitesimal doses. He took an herb 

 and extracted the juice, and this he 

 called "Mother Liquor." It was not 

 standardized, as all drug remedies are 

 today. In other words, a fluid extract 

 or tincture of a drug must contain a 

 certain per cent of the active princi- 

 ple of the drug; morphine in lauda- 

 num, aconite in tincture or fluid ex- 

 tract of aconite, and so on. The 

 "Mother Liquor" of Dr. Hahcnemann 

 might have contained 5 per cent or 40 

 of the active principle of the sub- 

 stance used. 



Of this "Mother Liquor" the Home- 

 opaths took one drop, put it into 101) 

 drops of alcohol, and mixed it with 



"one downward shake of the hand." 

 This was absolutely essential. To 

 make the next strength, or "potency" 

 one drop of the first mixture was 

 taken, added to 100 drops of alcohol 

 and mixed with two downward shakes 

 of the hand, and this was continued 

 to as "high" as the thirty-second po- 

 tency, but no matter whether the 

 third or last potency was used, there 

 was but one drop of the "Mother 

 Liquor in all, which means that in the 

 third there was but one ten-thou- 

 sandth of one drop of "Mother 

 Liquor" used. This was far too pow- 

 erful to be used undiluted, so a tei- 

 spooful of it was added to a cup of 

 water, and a small dose given at in- 

 tervals of time. 



Years ago the Homeopaths used to 

 secure beesting poison by letting the 

 bees sting a piece of sponge. The 

 poison was then extracted with alco- 

 hol — one of the most efficient of 

 germicides. This was diluted to the 

 third or thirty-second potency and 

 given as a "cure." If the third poten- 

 cy was used, a teaspoonful to the 

 glass of water, the patient got ap- 

 proximately one eighty-thousandth of 

 one drop of beesting poison to the 

 dose, assuming that the solution of 

 the poison was about the strength of 

 the drug "Mother liquor." 



Later on, some one, fully as brave 

 as the man who first ate an oyster, 

 broke away from the Homeopathic 

 idea and began giving the beesting 

 poison by way of the circulation 

 through the skin, and found a few per- 

 sons who would endure the pain of 

 the sting hoping for a cure, but the 

 writer has investigated many of these 

 alleged cures, with no satisfactory )'e- 

 sults. People claimed they were re- 

 lieved, or were free of the disease, 

 while othei's confessed that they had 

 rheumatism "just as badly as ever," 

 when reporting later. 



Let me ask this question: If the 

 poison of the sting of a bee, or sev- 

 eral of them, is a cure for rheuma- 

 tism, is it not more than likely that 

 the hundreds of thousands of intelli- 

 gent doctors in the world would have 

 found it out years ago? Nothing can 

 be more certain. 



Another thing: A positive proof 

 that the sting of a bee will not effect 

 a cure is that many beekeepers who 

 have written me assert that while 

 they are stung many times daily, five 

 to seven months in the year, they still 

 have rheumatism. Let us drop the 

 term "some form of rheumatism ' 

 which the laity loves to use, for there 

 is but one kind of the disease, mani- 

 fested, of course, in diffei-ent parts cf 

 the body. If the pain be in the lum- 

 bar region it becomes Lumbar rheu- 

 matism, or Lumbago; if in the region 

 of the great sciatic nerve, it is 

 called Sciatic, in the muscles. Muscu- 

 lar rheumatism, and so on ; but the 

 cause is the same, the manifestation, 

 the lodgment of a poison in a cei'tain 

 part. 



If the use of beesting poison 

 through the skin would cure rheuma- 

 tism, the same remedy given inter- 

 nally would produce the same result, 

 and certainly be much less painful. 



There is the same objection to 



vaunting the beesting "cure" as in 

 the use of patent nostrums, it delays 

 the appeal to the educated medical 

 man who has an intelligent hope of 

 finding the cause, and by treating 

 that relieve the patient. I remem- 

 ber one case where a lady, Mrs. M. 

 W., was a severe sufferer from rheu- 

 matism; I found that she had a 

 mouthful of badly decayed teeth, and 

 suggested that they were probably 

 the cause of the most of her ti-ouble; 

 she tried, I believe, everything she 

 could think of before having the teeth 

 extracted,, but finally got to it. She 

 began to improve at once, and now, 

 two years after, is relatively free of 

 the disease; but, the tissues were al- 

 tered by years of irritation, and she 

 suffers slightly at times, and possibly 

 always will. 



A number of years ago I sent out a 

 thousand slips stating that honey was 

 a cure for rheumatism, taken in table- 

 spoonful doses, no water to be drunk 

 for two hours after a dose was taken. 

 I received several letters thanking 

 me, as the writers had been cured. 

 One party sent me a dollar. He must 

 surely had been benefited. 



I have no doubt whatever that a 

 free use of honey will do as much 

 to cure rheumatism as the sting of 

 the bees will, perhaps more, for the 

 poison of the beesting affects a per- 

 son but locally. It is not absorbed 

 into the general circulation. If it was 

 it is more than likely that we should 

 soon have many reports of persons 

 killed by the poison, as we now hear 

 frequently of disastrous results fol- 

 lowing the stinging of some one by 

 bees. 



Iowa. 



HONEY HARVEST EXPERIMENTS 



By John Protheroe 



The July number of the Bulletin ds 

 la Societe Romande d'Apicultura 

 gives the results of some interesting 

 experiments by the brothers Tri- 

 coire : 



"1. On the capacity of the honey 

 stomach of the bee, the weight of 

 honey carried, and the time i;iken tc 

 load up. 



"We constructed small cubes con- 

 taining exactly one cubic centimeter 

 of honey. These were closed so as 

 to give access to only one bee at a 

 time. The I'efilling of these cubes by 

 ourselves and the emptying of them 

 by the bees, several times, allow us 

 to state that it takes forty visits by 

 the bees to empty them completely. 

 The average capacity of the honey 

 stomach of the bee is, therefore, 25 

 cubic millimeters. The specific grav- 

 ity of our honey being 1.4, each bee 

 carried 35 milligrammes of honey. 

 The time taken to load up this burden 

 was 180 seconds, that is to say, 3 

 minutes. 



"2. On the number of flowers vis- 

 ited by a bee to collect her burden 

 during a normal honey flow. 



"This experiment was made on 

 buckwheat flowers in the month of 

 August. The figures given i.re the 

 average corrected by Severn! obser- 

 vations. The search, that is to say, 



