AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL.
EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL WAGNER, WASHINGTON, D. C.
AT TWO DOLLARS PER ANNUM, PAYABLE IN ADVANCE.
Vol. VI. SEPTEMBER, 1870. No. 3.
[Translated for the American Bee Journal.]
The Foulbrood Question.
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.
“Again, Mr. De Molitor assigns to it a similar origin,—but instead of the Phora, regards some ichneumon-fly as the perpetrator of the evil—unless, indeed, he regards the Phora itself as an ichneumon. But this notion, too, is obviously untenable, for if ichneumon-flies laid their eggs in the larvæ, those eggs must surely hatch and the insect develop there, at least in its first stages; but on placing a foulbroody comb under glass, and watching it closely, nothing of this sort is found to take place.
“The Baroness of Berlepsch supposes the cause of foulbrood is to be found in the use of movable comb hives, and the various manipulations—oftimes needless—which the facilities afforded tempt the apiarian to undertake. Were this diagnosis correct, the remedy could readily be found. It would only be necessary to discontinue the use of such hives, and return to the ancient fixed comb system, to be safe from the inroads of this pestilence. But alas, it is only too well known that foulbrood existed extensively long before Dzierzon was born, and that it prevails where the fixed comb system is most rigidly adhered to.