54 
Bee Disease 
hives considerable store was found after the bees were gone. Some were of opinion that it 
.oose fiom the preceding being a bad breeding year and thought that the bees died of old 
age. Otheis attributed it to the moistness of the spring of 1783 which rendered the pro¬ 
viding of pollen difficult, for without pollen no brood can be raised....The fatal influence 
ascribed to the wetness ol the spring of 1782 seems to be improbable; though it might have 
affected the quantity of bees bred, it was not likely to put a stop to their breeding altogether, 
and the young bees ought at any rate to have escaped the desolating evil, if it were old 
age alone; yet wherever the mortality once made its appearance, every bee became its 
victim. 
In the early sixties of the nineteenth century the columns of The Field 
newspaper supply evidence of the existence of trouble which beekeepers of 
the day described in language almost identical with that used to describe the 
Isle of Wight disease at a later period. Occasional references to a similar 
trouble are to be found in the bee literature of this country until the beginning 
of the present century. 
In other countries, also, epidemic bee disease may still be heard of from 
time to time. Berlepsch records that in the spring of 1859, after the bees had 
made good use of the sallows, wholesale losses took place. The bees were to 
be seen in heaps, their bodies swollen with watery excrement. Many stocks 
were one day healthy, the next day half were dead, and the day following 
that all the bees were dead. The disease appeared in many places about Easter, 
and in others not till W hitsuntide. It was similar to human cholera, ravaged 
the whole of south Hanover and the lands adjoining and even extended into 
Denmark. 
According to Dadant (1907) during the years 1901-05 entire apiaries were 
depopulated in the province of Ancona, Italy, by mal de Maggio, a disease of 
the adult bee. The losses occurred just at the opening of the honey harvest. 
In Australia, whole apiaries are at times extinguished from some disease 
the cause of which is unknown (Garrett, 1910). 
In Brazil hundreds of stocks perish in March and April, the affected bees 
dying outside the hives. The beekeepers attribute the trouble to the poisonous 
properties of the nectar of certain plants which are in bloom at the time 1 
(Hannemann, 1909). 
In Canada and the United States epidemics occur and the following quota¬ 
tion from the American Gleanings in Bee Culture is an interesting description 
of virulent disease by Critchlow (1904): 
is this a new and strange bee disease, or is it a very malignant type of paralysis? 
Possibly some purely local cause is responsible for the great mortality among the bees. 
Who can give us some light? There seems to be great danger in Utah of a total loss of the 
entire bee industry. I shall give you as nearly as I can the conditions, both in the past and 
at the present time. 
In this valley and in the one fifty miles north of here, called Cache Valley, there have 
been foi many years a great many bees, both in the hands of skilled operators and in the 
1 Very many plants have come under the suspicion of beekeepers at one time and another 
in various parts of the world when there was no local spraying of fruit-blossom, etc., to which the 
losses could be attributed. 
