ADVANCED BEE CULTURE. 145 



a neighboring apiary, and bringing home the honey. The buying of 

 second-hand honey cans often brings foul brood into an apiary. If 

 the bees gain access to them they soon lick up any honey that may 

 have dripped upon the outside of the cans; or the bee-keeper may 

 rinse out the cans and throw out the water upon the ground where 

 the bees will come and suck it up. I have known a bee-keeper to 

 clean out a lot of second-hand cans, and feed the honey directly to 

 the bees, with the result that foul brood developed in every colony 

 that was fed. In rare instances the buying of queens from a dis- 

 tance has introduced foul brood into an apiary. The queens them- 

 selves had nothing to do with disseminating the disease, but the bees 

 and honey that accompanied them brought wilh them the germs of 

 the disease. It is a safe plan to put the new queen into a clean cage 

 and destroy the accompanying bees and cage. After foul brood is 

 once introduced into the apiary, it is disseminated by robbing, by 

 the careless exposure of infected honey, by changing combs from 

 hive to hive, or by extracting honey from infected combs, thus con- 

 taminating the extractor and other combs that may be brought in 

 contact with it. 



When foul brood is discovered in an apiary, what shall be done ? 

 In the first place don't "lose your head,'.' as the saying is. Don't be 

 in such a haste to be rid of thepest that a crop of honey is lost, and 

 the work of eradication imperfectly performed. Curative operations 

 can be carried on only during a successful honey flow, when bees 

 will not rob. If foul brood is discovered after the honey season is 

 over, treatment must be postponed until the following year. 



The entrances of all weak colonies should be contracted, and 

 any colony too weak to make the proper defense, or so weak that it 

 is not likely to pass the winter, better be destroyed at once. 



The spraying of the combs with acids, the fumigating of them 

 with formalin gas, the feeding of the bees with medicated honey, are 

 all of little avail so far as eradicating the disease is concerned, but 

 may do much in the way of checking the disease and preventing its 

 spread. By the proper feeding of medicated syrup in the spring, 

 the disease may be so held in check as to interfere little, if any, with 

 securing a crop of honey. This medicated syrup is made by mix- 

 ing one ounce of salicylic acid with sufficient alcohol to dissolve it, 

 after which it may be stirred into about 25 quarts of a not too thick 

 syrup or honey. We should begin feeding the bees this syrup as 

 early in the spring as they will take it, keeping each diseased colony 

 supplied with syrup until the flowers yield fairly well. Weak col- 

 onies better be united, but there must be caution in doing the work, 

 gradually bringing them together, that the bees may not be scat- 



