PART VII 



Bee Diseases 



HOW TO RID YOUR APIARY OF BLACK OR EUROPEAN FOUL BROOD. 



A CUBE THAT IS EASILY AND CHEAPLY APPLIED WITHOUT THE DESTBXJCTION OF 

 COMBS, BEES, HIVES, OB UTENSILS. 



This has heen 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 larvse 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. 



