1110 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Dec. 1 



ing the blasts of winter or the storms of 

 summer, ever intent on the one thing, guard- 

 ing that house, watching out toward the 

 north for his coming; but he will come no 

 more. Jerry Wood is gone from the farm— 

 gone from the neighborhood; and as I turn 

 to finish packing my last hive for winter I 

 realize that I too shall go away some day, 

 and then "Whose shall these things be?" 

 Pataskala, Ohio. 



PICKLED BROOD. 



Starvation Plan Not a Cure; how the Introduc- 

 tion of New Queens does Effect a Cure; are 

 Italians More Immune to the Dis- 

 ease than Blacks? 



BY C. F. BENDER. 



There has been a great deal written on 

 the diseases of bees, especially "pickled 

 brood," by those who have had only a limit- 



ed among the weaker colonies which were 

 needing room. These combs had all been 

 soaked in the same vessel in the attempt to 

 remove the old pollen ; the colonies which 

 received them took the disease without ex- 

 ception. 



I sent samples to Dr. Howard, who pro- 

 nounced the trouble to be pickled brood in a 

 very malignant form, as I had already de- 

 cided for myself. Every one assured me it 

 was not serious; that it would disappear of 

 itself, even if left entirely alone. A few 

 cases did finally get well without treatment, 

 but there was another cause for that, as 

 will be noticed later on. In general, mat- 

 ters grew rapidly worse, so that by June 15 

 I had thirty affected colonies, about a dozen 

 of them with little or no healthy brood in 

 the hive. In the worst ones the old bees 

 disappeared rapidly also, and they were soon 

 reduced to mere nuclei. 



I first tried feeding medicated syrup, and 

 the treated' ones grew much better while the 



-M 



FIG. 4. —A GROVE OF JAPAN AND AMERICAN CATALPA-TREES. 



ed experience. Having succeeded in getting 

 rid of the disease for a time, they suppose 

 the cure to be permanent, and proceed to 

 describe their success in the bee-journals. 

 Indeed, I think that I was guilty of some- 

 thing very much like that myself. But two 

 years' study of the disease, and the condi- 

 tions producing it, has finally brought a so- 

 lution of the trouble, which seems to me to 

 be the only true one. It has been given a 

 rather severe test this summer, and has 

 never failed so far. 



I am pretty sure the disease was generat- 

 ed in my own apiary. The first year I could 

 find no cases in the neighborhood outside my 

 own yard, and I had received no bees from 

 abroad which could have introduced it. I 

 had a lot of moldy combs that spring, and 

 about the 10th of May these were distribut- 



feeding lasted, but no longer. The second 

 experiment was shaking them on to clean 

 combs which had been thoroughly fumigated 

 with formaldehyde. This, like the other, 

 seemed to work all right at first; but the 

 disease reappeared sooner or later in every 

 colony so treated, and at the same time con- 

 tinued to spread in the rest of the apiary. 

 It seemed to me that heroic measures were 

 in order; so I proceeded to shake every col- 

 ony in the yard on foundation, 'starved them 

 three days, and then fed them sugar syrup 

 until the combs were built out. The honey- 

 flow came on about this time, and for the 

 next six weeks every thing was fair and 

 lovely. I had burned the hives out with a 

 paint-burner, melted up the old combs, 

 burned the frames, fumigated the honey- 

 house, and, lastly, destroyed my smoker. 



