486 DISEASES OF BEES. 



Perhaps, also, in those regions, the virus of foul-brood may 

 have become weakened, in time, as has been observed in the 

 virus of certain diseases affecting the human race. In such 

 countries, the simple transferring of a colony of foul-brood 

 bees into a healthy hive, seems sufficient to cure them." 



800. Foul-brood is transmitted from one hive to another — 

 like Asiatic cholera among men — by different means. Robbing 

 (664) is probably one of the naain helps to contamination, 

 as the robber bees may take the bacillus home, among their 

 hair, unawares. Working bees may even gather the scourge 

 from some sweet-scented blossom contaminated by previous 

 visitors. The transportation, or shipping, of bees, from one 

 part of the country to another, is often a means of spreading 

 the disease, and some of our State legislatures have made very 

 stringent laws on the subject. No contaminated combs should 

 be shipped from one part of the country to another. 



Contagious diseases were once the scourge of the land. 

 Who has not heard of the plague, the dread disease of the 

 dark ages? According to Chambers' Encyclopedia, the plague 

 of 1665 destroyed seventy thousand people, in London alone. 

 Earlier stiU, in 1348, according to Sismondi, the plague de- 

 stroyed three-fifths of the entire population of Eiirope, ex- 

 tending even up into Iceland. It was during that terrible 

 scourge that the city of Florence lost over one hundred thousand 

 people. If those dreaded diseases are now but little feared, 

 we owe it to scientific discoveries. The microscope has shown 

 that nearly aU contagious diseases, which men or animals are 

 subject to, are caused by living organisms, and medical science 

 now teaches how they may be avoided by inoculation, or 

 other means. More discoveries are daily made, and we can 

 hope that the day is not far, when the advancement of science 

 wiU have put an end to all these ills, and the bacillus alvei will 

 be a thing of the past. 



W. R. Howard of Texas, F. C. Harrison of Ontario, T. W. 



