The American Bee Journal, Volume VI, Number 3, September 1870

The following remarks, made by the Rev. Mr. Kleine, before a convention of bee-keepers in the town of Meppen, province of Hanover, Prussia, present a succinct account of the present state of this subject abroad.
“The question propounded in our programme,” said Mr. Kleine, “and which I have been requested to consider, may properly be thus subdivided—first. Has any efficient remedy for foulbrood been devised? and, secondly, What are we to think of Lambrecht’s theory?
“I wish I could answer the first interrogatory with a positive aye . If I could, I should regard myself entitled not only to your thanks, but to those of the entire bee-keeping community; for foulbrood is confessedly the direst evil that can befall the bee-keeper, and the appearance is, at present, that it is likely speedily to spread everywhere, where bees are cultivated.
“Remedies in abundance have, indeed been suggested, and recommended as efficient and infallible. But when we come to investigate them, we seek in vain for any solid reason why curative qualities should be attributed to them; and we usually find that the alleged recovery of diseased colonies can fairly be ascribed to something else than the application of those vaunted remedies. Possibly, too, the real disease,—the genuine, virulent, contagious foulbrood, did not exist, and the boasted cure consisted merely in the apparent arrest and removal of some simple malady which, in the course of nature, would speedily have run its harmless course and disappeared, and with the cure of which the medicaments or treatment employed had, in reality, no connection whatever. How indeed can it be possible to devise and apply an efficient remedy for a disease of the origin and nature of which entire ignorance has still prevailed.
“Dr. Asmusz conceived, some years ago, that he had discovered the cause of foulbrood in a minute winged insect—the Phora incrassata ; and the Baron of Berlepsch coincided with him in opinion. The doctor supposed that the parent fly deposited her eggs in the larvæ of the bees, which, dying in consequence and putrifying, thus generated the devastating disease. It happens, however, that the Phoridæ do not deposit their eggs in living organisms, but, under the impulse of native instinct, in dead bodies only. Consequently it does not and cannot cause the dreaded disease.