THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



269 



sold me the colony which iutected my apiary 

 persists to this day in asserting thai; he has 

 never had bee paralysis in his apiary, and 

 now I suppose that he is selling queens and 

 scattering the disease all over the length and 

 breadth of the land. Every scientific man, 

 who is acquainted with modern ideas, knows 

 that there is no such thing as spontaneous 

 generation, and that an infectious malady 

 like this has its origin in some germ or bacil- 

 lus, and is propagated like small pox, from 

 contagion, A conscientious queen breeder 

 will not sell queens from an infected apiary. 

 I propose that the bee journals invite their 

 readers to report any outbreak of the malady 

 and if it comes from a queen purchased from 

 a breeder, to give his name to the world, so 

 that he may have no further opportunity to 

 disseminate contagion through the country. 



You will render an untold good to your 

 readers, if you will invite communications 

 of this sort. Probably 99 per cent, of your 

 readers have no queens for -sale, anS you will 

 enlarge your subscription list if you will let 

 it be known that you will undertake the task 

 of exposing those unscrupulous persons who 

 have so little conscience as to spread disease 

 and death in the apiaries of the land. The 

 various associations ought to take the mat- 

 ter up and do every thing possible to prevent 

 the further spread of this malady. The 

 journals devoted to bee culture should keep 

 the matter before their readers and invite 

 communications from those who have any- 

 thing of interest to give to their brethren in 

 regard to this subject. No man should pur- 

 chase a queen from a breeder without first 

 inquiring whether there had been for six 

 months past any bee paralysis within two 

 miles of the apiary. If a breeder should 

 then make a false statement in reply, to the 

 effect that there had been no bee paralysis in 

 his apiary, and it should turn out that the 

 queen was infected, a prosecution for obtain- 

 ing money under false pretenses might be 

 maintained successfully. Queen breeders, 

 who are honest, and who have not got the in- 

 fection, will find it to their advantage to add 

 in their advertisements. " There is no bee 

 paralysis in my apiary." In my opinion, it 

 will not be many years, before it will be im- 

 possible to carry on the business without 

 some assurances of this sort being given to 

 the purchaser. 



Cholera and yellow fever are excluded from 

 our country by quarantine methods. This 

 has resulted from an understanding of the 



nature and methods of the propagation of 

 these diseases. There was a time when these 

 visitations were regarded as inevitable and 

 as Providential. It is now known that they 

 can be controlled. And so if it were under- 

 stood that this disease is infectious, and the 

 proper precautions are taken against the 

 spread of the disease, by bee-keepers at 

 large, it is possible to prevent its further dis- 

 semination. 



[Here follows what Mr. Ford originally 

 wrote for the American Bee Journal. — Ed.] 



In a late number of the American Bee 

 Journal was an article copied from Glean- 

 ings upon the poisonous character of the 

 pollen of the Southern yellow jasmine, to 

 which I wish to call the attention of South- 

 ern bee-keepers as written under an appa- 

 rent misapprehension. The writer main- 

 tains that the pollen of this flower is poison- 

 ous and that the bees swell up and die in 

 great numbers during the period when these 

 flowers are in bloom. I have not the article 

 before me, but the readers of the Journal 

 will probably recall it. 



I am aware that many mistakes are made 

 in the progress of every department of scien- 

 tific inquiry occasioned by two obstacles : 

 One is the habit of jumping at conclusions 

 without suflicient data upon which to base 

 them, and the other is the lack of close and 

 accurate methods of observation, and pa- 

 tience in verifying and collating them be- 

 fore accepting them as proven. We are 

 most of us prone to these mistakes. 



It is submitted that one intelligently ob^ 

 served and accurately established fact is 

 worth a whole volume of theories, to the in- 

 tellgent apiarist, who reads the periodicals, 

 in which all find so much pleasure. 



Now, in order to enable our friends who 

 are interested in this subject to get at the 

 truth as to whether the instincts of the bee 

 fail to protect her from laying up for the 

 young of her well-ordered community a food 

 that is poisonous, and calculated to destroy 

 instead of preserving it, I propose to submit 

 with diffidence, in opposition to the views of 

 the above writer, that the symptoms of pois- 

 oning from the yellow jasmine flower, which 

 he gives on page 182, are precisely the symp- 

 toms of a very contagious disease well known 

 under the name of bee paralysis, which I 

 have had in my apiary continuously for 

 three years. He does not give all the symp- 

 toms, but those that he does give are unmis- 

 takeable, and indicate clearly to my mind 



