404 Foul Brood. 



sad havoc in many regions of our country. No bee malady 

 can compare with this in mahgnancy. 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 felI"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 larvae but those of other insects, both by means 

 of the putrescent foOl 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, small pox, etc., are now thought to be due to- 

 microscopic germs, 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 



