THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



11 



The reason why I failed to cure it in the 

 old bive may have been on account of the 

 propolis. There was lo s of it. Or it might 

 h tve been from the chippings of brood caps 

 as I noticed the bottom of the hive was 

 strewn with them. Whatever the cause, it 

 re-appeared, 1 am sorry to say, because I use 

 chafif hives and it is quite a job to boil th^ra. 



The half on a new stand rais-d a young 

 queen from the first eggs and is stronger 

 now in bees than the old one and has not yet 

 shown any signs of the disease and probably 

 will not, for it should have shown disease 

 about the same time as the one in the old 

 hive. In most instances t appears in from 

 three to six weeks after inoculation, pro- 

 vided there is brood in the hives at the 

 time. 



After removing the foul combs from the 

 above colony I spread . ome pape s on the 

 fio?r and removed the combs to the homy 

 house to keep them secure from robi^ers. 

 The next morning I brushed what young 

 bees had hatched into a comb basket and 

 dumped them into an empty hive giv ng 

 them two omls partly filled with unsealed 

 honey, also dropping in a six-day -old virgin 

 queen. I continued to brush off and add the 

 young ' ees to them each day uiti: they had 

 a'l hatched, adding more combs as they 

 needed more room, and kept them confined 

 four days from the time the first lot was put 

 in. It was my intention at the time to put 

 them through the shake-oft' process and then 

 unite all three when fall came, if they were 

 all clean, but the queen was laying before 

 the brood had all hatche.l out of the foul 

 combs and I concluded to let them be until 

 the disease appeared although the chances 

 were small as a bee not over twenty-f^ur 

 hours old appears to retain all the hone^ it 

 removes from a cell This colony, when I 

 examine! it last (October 2(i) Siiowed no 

 signs of the disease. 



The above experiment s right in line wi h 

 one I had tried two years before which was 

 this : I had a colony that I had suspected 

 for four mouths of having he disease ; the 

 larva would die and soften but i-ot lose its 

 shape or color and would then be removed 

 by the bees. It would not draw out on the 

 head of a pin and had no glue pot-odor, but 

 at the end of four months, ju t before the 

 fall honey flow, it showed both of these un- 

 mistakable sy ii ptoms. After .they had got 

 the combs about two-thirds built and fill d 

 with hon^ y but none sealed up (there were 



twelve L. frames in this br od nest four of 

 which they had built and had never had any 

 brood in them) I went to it and removed 

 three of these four combs and shook the bees 

 off from them into one of Doolittie's nucleus 

 boxes and formed a small colony of them. 

 The bees shook off ware hangmg to the bot- 

 toms of the combs and were part of the comb 

 building force of the hive. I hived them on 

 tnree combs partly full of sealed honey. 

 They wintered successfully and built up the 

 nex spring and finished KiO one-pound ec- 

 tions, eight unfinished, and furnished three 

 L. combs o. sealed honey out of their brood 

 nest, besides having enough for winter. 

 They have not to the present day shown the 

 first sign of foul brood. 



Last summer I used t e old hives in mak- 

 ing a cure of a colony that I had divided, for 

 experiments, into four three-frame nuclei 

 just as the disease fi.st commenced to show 

 in th . pronounced form. I left one f the 

 nuclei on the old stand in the old hive, the 

 other three occupied clean hives about two 



eeks before removing the foul combs to 

 cure them. It was successful in ;llfourcas s 

 but the disease had just commenced to show 

 in a few cells, from one to three in each 

 comb. 



From what I have seen, I believe it is safe 

 to use the old hive where the disease is Just 

 tjefjinni}}g to show, but unsafe where it has 

 been in progress for some time and the bees 

 have got the dried up contents of the dis- 

 eased cells strewn on the hive bottom and 

 mixed up morj or '.ess with the i)ropolis. 



We have another source of contagion here 

 that I have never seen mentioned before and 

 one that is ab'e to carry the disease long dis- 

 tances; it is small remnants of colonies 

 ranging from a teacupful up to a quart of 

 bees that have dwindled wit > the disease and 

 then derserted their h ves. They are not 

 small after-swarms because they come out of 

 sw rming season and are accompanied by an 

 old ragged winged queen in the most of 

 cases. I had three such last season and four 

 this, th;'.t I know of, come into the yard and 

 try to unite with clean colonies. Apparent- 

 ly they were all killed off but not before hey 

 gave up some of the houey they brought with 

 them as is proven by the disease appearing 

 in from three to six weeks in the colony 

 where they tried to force a i entrance. Two 

 of them clustered this year, so I gathered 

 them in before they had done any mischief. 



