The common dysentery--indicated by the bees soiling their hives, as they void their feces within instead of without--which has been so free, of late, to work havoc in our apiaries, is, without doubt, I think, consequent upon wrong management on the part of the apiarist, as already suggested in Chapter XVII. As the methods to prevent this have already been sufficiently considered, we pass to the terrible FOUL BROOD. This disease, said to have been known to Aristotle--though this is doubtful, as a stench attends common dysentery--though it has occurred in our State as well as in States about us, is not familiar to me, I having never seen but one case, and that on Kelly's Island, in the summer of 1875, where I found it had reduced the colonies on that Island to two. No bee malady can compare with this in malignancy. By it Dzierzon once lost his whole apiary of 500 colonies.--Mr. E. Rood, first President of the Michigan Association, has lost his bees two or three times by this same terrible plague. The symptoms are as follows: Decline in the prosperity of the colony, because of failure to rear brood. The brood seems to putrefy, becomes "brown and salvy," and gives off a stench, which is by no means agreeable, while later, the caps are concave instead of convex, and have a little hole through them. There is no longer any doubt as to the cause of this fearful plague. Like the fell "Pebrine," which came so near exterminating the "silk worm," and a most lucrative and extensive industry in Europe, it, as conclusively shown by Drs. Preusz and Shönfeld, of Germany, is the result of fungous or vegetable growth. Shönfeld not only infected healthy bee larvæ, but those of other insects, both by means of the putrescent foul brood, and by taking the spores. Fungoid growths are very minute, and the spores are so infinitesimally small as often to elude the sharp detection of the expert microscopist. Most of the terrible, contagious diseases that human flesh is heir to, like typhus, diphtheria, cholera, small pox, &c., &c., are now thought to be due to microscopic germs, and hence to be spread from home to home, and from hamlet to hamlet, it is only necessary that the spores, the minute seeds, either by contact or by some sustaining air current, be brought to new soil of flesh blood or other tissue--their garden spot--when they at once spring into growth, and thus lick up the very vitality of their victims. The huge mushroom will grow in a night. So too, these other plants--the disease germs--will develop with marvelous rapidity; and hence the horrors of yellow fever, scarlatina, and cholera. To cure such diseases, the fungi must be killed. To prevent their spread, the spores must be destroyed, or else confined. But as these are so small, so light, and so invisible--easily borne and wafted by the slightest zephyr of summer, this is often a matter of the utmost difficulty.