The combs of diseased colonies which contain brood may be assembled
over a single one of these colonies, or, if the amount of brood be too
great for one colony to care for, over several such diseased colonies,
until the young bees have emerged. All of the honey is then to be
extracted. While it is wholesome as food, it should not be offered
for sale, lest some of it be used in feeding bees or be inadvertently
exposed where foraging bees might find it and carry to their hives the
germs of this disease, harmless to other creatures but so fatal to bee
life. A good use for this honey is to employ it in making vinegar. One
and one-third pounds added to each gallon of rain water or soft spring
water and allowed to ferment for three months in a warm place makes a
quality of vinegar quite equal to the best cider vinegar. Provision for
the free circulation of air through the cask should be made. This is
easily secured by placing the cask, not completely filled, on its side
and boring an auger hole in each end near the upper side, the holes to
be covered with cheese cloth or fine gauze, to keep out insects.
If the honey containing the germs is to be used for feeding bees, it is
to be diluted with half its own quantity, by measure, of water and kept
at the boiling point for three hours in a water bath--a vessel within
another containing water.
The combs from which the honey has been extracted, as well as all of
the pieces built by the bees during their four days' confinement, may
be melted into wax, by thorough boiling in soft water. This wax should
be kept liquid for 48 hours or longer, to allow all impurities to
settle. These will include the foul brood spores, which may then be
removed with, the impure wax by scraping or cutting away the bottom of
the cake. These scrapings should be burned. The same disposition had
better be made of the frames from which the combs containing germs were
removed.
In all of this work the utmost care should be exercised to avoid the
dripping of honey about the apiary or the exposure of implements,
receptacles, or combs smeared with or containing honey from the
diseased colonies. It may even be better, in order to save time and
possible risk, where but few combs and a comparatively small amount
of honey are involved, to destroy all of these immediately after
their removal from the hive. The old hive and all utensils used about
the diseased colony should be disinfected by washing in a solution
of corrosive sublimate--one-eighth ounce in one gallon of water--and
should afterwards be exposed to the air and sun for some time. If
healthy colonies are to be manipulated immediately after handling
diseased ones the hands of the operator must also be disinfected by
washing in the solution just mentioned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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