486 DISEASES OF BEES. 



of the disease and permits of its being more easily overcome. 

 Perhaps, also, in those regions, the virus of foul-brood may 

 have become weakened, in time, as has been observed in the 

 virus of certain diseases afEecting the human race. In such 

 countries, the simple transferring of a colony of foul-brood 

 bees into a healthy hive, seems sufficient to cure them." 



800. Foul-brood is transmitted from one hive to an- 

 other—like Asiatic cholera among men— by different means. 

 Robbing (664) is probably one of the main helps to con- 

 tamination, as the robber bees may take the bacillus home, 

 among their hair, unawares. Working bees may even gather 

 the scourge from some sweet-scented blossom contaminated 

 by previous visitors. The transportation, or shipping, of 

 bees, from one part of the country to another, is often a 

 means of spreading the disease, and some of our State legis- 

 latures have made very stringent laws on the subject. In 

 these States foul-brood inspectors have been appointed to 

 examine apiaries where the disease exists and treat the bees. 



Contagious diseases were once the scourge of the land. 

 Who has not heard of the plague, the dread disease of. the 

 dark ages? According to Chambers' Encyclopedia, the plague 

 of 1665 destroyed seventy thousand people, in London alone. 

 Earlier still, in 1348, according to Sismondi, the plague de- 

 stroyed three-fifths of the entire population of Europe, ex- 

 tending even up into Iceland.. It was during that terrible 

 scourge that the city of Florence lost over one hundred thou- 

 sand people. If those dreaded diseases are now but little 

 feared, we owe it to scientific discoveries. The microscope 

 has shown that nearly all contagious diseases, which men or 

 animals are subject to, are caused by living organisms, and 

 medical science now teaches how they may be avoided by 

 inoculation, or other means. More discoveries are daily made, 

 and we can hope that the day is not far, when the advance- 

 ment of science will have put an end to all these ills, and the 

 bacillus alvei will be a thing of the past. 



W. R. Howard of Texas, F. C. Harrison of Ontario, T. W. 



