fO4 Foul Brood, 
sad havoc in many regions of our country. No bee malady 
can compare with this in malignancy. By it Dzierzon once 
lost his whole apiary of 500 colonies. Mr. E. Rood, first 
President of the Michigan Association, lost all his bees two 
or three times by this terrible plague. 
The symptoms are as follows: Decline in the prosperity 
of the colony, because of failure to rear brood. The brood 
seems to putrefy, becomes “brown and salvy,” and gives 
off a stench which is by no means agreeable, while later 
the caps are concave instead of convex, and many will have 
little holes through them. The most decided symptom is 
the salvy elastic mass in the brood cell. With a pin head 
we never draw forth a larva or pupa, but this brown stringy 
mass which afterwards dries down in the cell. 
There is no longer any doubt as to the cause of this 
fearful plague. Like the fell “Pebrine” which came so 
near exterminating the silk worm, and a most lucrative and 
extensive industry in Europe, it, as conclusively shown by 
Drs. Preusz and Schonfeld, of Germany, is the result of 
fungous or vegetable growth. Schonfeld not only infected 
healthy bee larvz but those of other insects, both by means 
of the putrescent foul brood and by taking the spores. 
Professor Cohn discovered in 1874 that the cause of foul 
brood was a microbe, Bacillus alveolaris. Mr. Hilbert the 
following year showed that these micro-organisms existed 
in the mature bees as well as in the brood. 
Fungoid growths are very minute, and the spores are so 
infinitesimally small as often to elude the sharp detection 
of the expert microscopist. Most of the terrible contagious 
diseases that human flesh is heir to, like typhus, diphtheria, 
cholera, smaii pox, etc., are now thought to be due to 
microscopic g.rms, and hence to be spread from home to 
home, and from hamlet to hamlet; it is only necessary that 
the spores, the minute seeds, either by contact or by some 
sustaining air current, be brought to new soil of flesh, blood, 
or other tissue—their garden spot—-when they at once spring 
into growth, and thus lick up the very vitality of their 
victims. The huge mushroom will grow in a night. So, 
too, these other plants—the disease germs—will develop 
