PART VII 
Bee Diseases 
HOW TO RID YOUR APIARY OF BLACK OR EUROPEAN FOUL BROOD. 
A CURE THAT IS EASILY AND CHEAPLY APPLIED WITHOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF 
COMBS, BEES, HIVES, OR UTENSILS. 
This has been one of the hardest problems for me to solve that I 
have ever met in bee-keeping. For three years we tried every thing in 
the line of disinfectants that we could hear of, also putting our bees 
on foundation, which did but little good. Some of the things we tried 
seemed to help at first to check its deadly work; but in a short time 
it would show itself again as bad as before; and so the years went by 
while we lost nearly our entire honey crop and over a thousand colonies 
before we got the first sign of a cure, and even then it was so simple 
it seemed like a drowning man catching at straws. But I kept at the 
little proof I had until I developed it into a perfect cure. Then for 
three years we tested it thoroughly on hundreds of colonies, so that we 
could be sure it was a cure which could be depended on. 
This cure is on the line of introducing new blood into the apiary, 
which will necessitate getting a choice Italian breeding-queen, one of 
the best honey-gathering strains that can be procured. For this special 
purpose I prefer quite yellow Italians. Now for the cure. 
Go to every diseased colony you have and build it up either by 
giving frames of maturing brood or uniting two or more until you have 
them fairly strong. After this, go over every one and remove the queen; 
then in nine days go over them again, and be sure to destroy every 
maturing queen-cell, or virgin if any have hatched. Then go to your 
breeding-queen and take enough of her newly hatched larve to rear 
enough queen-cells from to supply each one of your diseased queenless 
colonies with a ripe queen-cell or virgin just hatched. These are to be 
introduced to your diseased colonies on the twentieth day after you 
have removed their old queen, and not one hour sooner, for upon this 
very point your whole success depends; for your young queen must 
not commence to lay until three or four days after the last of the old 
brood is hatched, or 27 days from the time you remove the old queen. 
If you are very careful about this matter of time between the last of 
the old brood hatching and the young queen commencing to lay, you 
will find the bees will clean out their breeding-combs for this young 
queen, so that she will fill them with as fine healthy brood as a hive 
ever contained. ‘This I have seen in several hundred hives, and have 
never seen a cell of the disease in a hive after being treated as above 
described. 
