Download or read book The Pennsylvania Beekeeper, Vol. 4 written by Pennsylvania Beekeepers' Association and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Pennsylvania Beekeeper, Vol. 4: April 1929 Apparently the disease has not worked its way into this valley from the outside in recent years. It has been here a long time. A system of management has been developed here that has a tendency to check the disease and at the same time to keep it alive. Those who use this system stick to a long hive with frames about a foot square. They firmly believe that all black combs are bad: that bees should not be allowed to try to raise brood the second year in the same comb. Every fall they take out the brood combs from the center of the hive along with any surplus honey and move the end frames to the center. The empty frames are replaced the next spring when the packing is removed from the ends of the hive. There is a tendency among these people to scald their hives or scrub them with hot salt water before hiving a new swarm. In the big valley are a number of centers of infection of such long stand ing that the owners seem to have no idea when the disease first appeared. Invariably they laid the trouble to spraying, insisting that before people sprayed one never heard of foulbrood. Such apiaries were for practical purposes abandoned. Overturned hives with exposed combs invited robbers and offered every possibility of infecting the entire neighborhood. Stray swarms hive themselves often enough to keep the infection alive. One infection center was located in a long narrow valley about half of which is covered with forest growth. A railroad and a highway run the length of this valley. The whole apiary of 13 colonies was infected and in addition a large pile of old combs was half hidden by weeds. He stated that he had foulbrood five years before but had cleaned it all up. About a mile west in an apiary of five was one light infection. Across the road was an apiary of 20 colonies and no infection. About. The same distance east was a good apiary the honey of which took prizes at the county fair the year before. The owner was not familiar. With foulbrood. Early last spring he found one of his colonies dead. He thought the simplest way to feed their honey to the other colonies was to let the bees help themselves. Accordingly he blocked up the hive second story lid. As a result about all his bees were dead when inspected in August. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.