260 THE BEE-KEEPER’S MANUAL. 
by putting them, for forty-eight hours, into an airy 
vessel, and then into a new dwelling, cutting away 
all their former comb. But even this the Baron 
never managed to accomplish; the bees, in every 
instance, catching the disease afresh, and having to 
be brimstoned at the last. So wrote Dzierzon: 
“Better make short work of it . . . and spend 
your money in buying sound stocks. Burn out 
the hives with straw [as a first disinfectant], then 
brimstone them, wash twice with strong solution of 
chloride of lime, and leave them to dry in the sun 
or air. After the second degree they can soon be 
used again, but, after the first, not for at least two 
years. Wash the stands repeatedly in the same 
way, and leave them empty a year.” Happily this 
paragraph expresses a state of things which the bee- 
keeper is not compelled to realise any longer. 
There follow, in Von Berlepsch’s work, a series of 
speculations as to the origin of the disease, and 
some, at any i1a‘e, of these remain as forcible as 
at the first, for we are still confronted by the 
question, “‘What are the conditions that favour 
the development of the bacteria and the micrococcus 
spores?” The first supposed cause was that a very 
small fly (Phora incrassata) enters the hive and de- 
posits its eggs, one apiece, in the brood-cells, makine 
choice of such of them as are in an advanced stage, 
but still unsealed. The phora larva hatches inside 
the bee larva, and eats away its inside in ichneu- 
mon style. Now, this particular insect is known 
to deposit its eggs only in dead bodies; yet the Baron 
believes that some such parasite is the originator of 
