The Occurrence of Diseases of Adult Bees. 7 



first shipment all the bees were dead on arrival and no live mites 

 were discovered. The bees had been selected from a colony that 

 was being robbed, and the bees were apparently old and worn out 

 before being sent. The second shipment consisted of a queenbee 

 and attendants in a queen-mailing cage, all but two of the worker 

 bees reaching Washington alive. The queen was not found to con- 

 tain mites. Many of the accompanying living worker bees were 

 found to contain living mites, showing conclusively that it is an easy 

 matter to import the living mites to the United States. Living 

 mites were found in worker bees after they had been dead for several 

 days. 



Means of preventing introduction. — If the reports oithe great losses 

 caused by the Isle of Wight disease in Great Britain are credited, and 

 if it be assumed that the mite is not present in the United States, 

 there is reason to look on the introduction of these mites as a dan- 

 gerous possibility. Since the mites are so readily imported through 

 the shipment of queenbees through the mails, it is a matter of some 

 surprise that the disease is not found and universally distributed 

 here. While some of the earliest importations of bees to the United 

 States were made from England, such as the introduction to Massa- 

 chusetts in the seventeenth century, the recent shipments of queens 

 have been from Carniola, Cyprus, the Caucasus (chiefly through 

 France), but especially from Italy. Because of the newness of the 

 discovery regarding the cause of the Isle of Wight disease, the absence 

 of any record of the occurrence of the mite in Italy or elsewhere on 

 the continent of Europe 2 or Asia is without significance. There of 

 course remains the possibility, but scarcely the probability, that the 

 parasite is exceedingly local in its distribution, as stated by Rennie 

 (18). This is supported by the belief of many British beekeepers 

 that the disease was first limited to the Isle of Wight and then spread 

 rapidly through the British Isles. It is now reported generally but 

 not universally in those islands. 



The fact that this mite belongs to or is related to the genus Tar- 

 sonemus, suggests that it may be at some stage of its life history a 

 plant feeder, yet its specialized structure (4) (causing it to be put in 

 a new genus by Hirst (10)) may be taken as evidence against this 

 view. The fact that all stages of the mite have now been found in 

 the tracheal tubes of the honeybee thorax would suggest its strictly 

 parasitic habit. 



The climatic conditions of the British Isles have been considered 

 by some beekeepers as a contributing cause of the disease. While 

 this is a possibility, unless the mite is associated with some species 



2 In the January, 1922, issue of L'Apiculteur (volume 66, No. 1, pp. 20-23) appears the announcement 

 that the mite associated with the Isle of Wight disease has been found and determined by L. Berland, 

 assistant in the Museum d'Histoire Xaturelle (Paris), in bees sent through the editor of the above journal 

 from the French Alps. The exact location is not recorded. 



