Pestilence, or Faux Couvain (as Schirach calls it).
Pestilence has been reckoned among bee-maladies, and attributed to the residence of dead larvæ in the cells, from a careless deposition of ova by the queen, (the head of the grub not being placed in a proper position for exclusion, when that period has arrived,) it has also been ascribed to cold, and to bad nursing, that is, feeding with unwholesome food.
Treatment.
The remedies which have been found most successful in all these maladies, excepting vertigo, are cordials, namely wine and sugar. This circumstance, taken in conjunction with their occurring at the spring of the year, tends to confirm my opinion that the ailments of bees arise from hunger and filth.
Cleanliness and timely supplies of sugared ale, particularly during the months of February and March, are the preventive remedies which have hitherto preserved my bees in a state of healthful activity. In ungenial springs, feeding should be continued even through a considerable part of May, if the preceding autumn have been unfavourable, or if a cold May have succeeded to warm weather in early spring,—the earliest vernal flowers affording but a scanty supply of honey. The apiarian is sometimes astonished that he should lose his bees at this advanced season of the year, when but a short time before he had seen them in full health and activity. Had he afforded that food which his bees could not obtain from a comparatively immature and honeyless vegetation, their hives would still have gladdened him with the spectacle of a thriving population.
“If e’er dank autumn, with untimely storm,
The honey’d harvest of the year deform,
Or the chill blast, from Eurus’ mildew wing,
Blight the fair promise of returning spring,
Full many a hive but late alert and gay,
Droops in the lap of all-inspiring May.”
Evans.
The reader must now perceive the importance of feeding, and that the transition from health to languor and death is less frequently to be ascribed to disease, than to the want of the necessary means to continue the vital energy. The suddenness of the unhappy change may reasonably lead the uninformed or improvident to suppose that an incurable malady has visited their hives:—so long as the store of honey lasted, there were health and prosperity; but that gone, famine commenced its ravages, and an extinction of the bees of course followed. A little foresight and a little trouble would have kept off the calamity. I am perhaps tediously particular in this notice. I wish to impress my noviciate bee-friends with the necessity of thus providing for their hives, that the most frequent agent of mischief,—hunger,—may be kept out of them. Still further let me also recommend to them, on the approach of winter to have the floors of their hives or boxes well cleaned from insects and their eggs, and from all heterogeneous matter. This is a business which the bees themselves, when the weather admits of it, are particularly attentive to; indeed they refrain, as much as possible, from dropping their excrement upon the floors, taking advantage of every fine day in winter to sally forth and get rid of it. This was proved by the experiments of Mr. Hunter: indeed they sometimes fall a sacrifice to their personal neatness in this respect, their bodies becoming so swelled, from the accumulation of fæces, as completely to disable them from flying, when the weather is sufficiently favourable to admit of their going out; in consequence of which, they fall to the ground and perish.
Schirach and others recommend, in cases of Faux Couvain, to cut out the infected combs, and to clean and fumigate the hive by burning aromatics under it.