DOOLITTLB METHOD 279 



queens. He worked persistently until he succeeded in pro- 

 ducing queen-cells artificially, and this method, described by 

 him in his little work, "Scientific queen-rearing," has been 

 much improved upon of late years and is now called "The 

 Doolittle System." It consists in manufacturing queen cell 

 cups artificially out of beeswax and supplying them with 

 young larvae or eggs transferred into them from worker cells. 

 A large number of these queen-cells are furnished to a queen- 

 less colony, and after the work of perfecting the queen-cells 

 has been done by the queenless bees, they are given into the 

 upper story of a strong colony whose bees will properly take 

 care of these queen-cells on the only condition that this upper 

 story is separated from the main breeding apartment in which 

 the queen is laying, by means of a queen excluder (732). It 

 is astonishing but it is nevertheless a fact that bees on the 

 other side of a queen excluding partition in a hive containing 

 a good queen, will take care of queen-cells given them and will 

 allow them to hatch. The Messrs. Giraud of Landreau, France, 

 in their little work "Traite Pratique de I'elevage des reines"' 

 even advise the using of a colony with queen, for the entire 

 work, separating the combs in which queen cells are reared 

 from the main apartment by a perforated zinc. They suc- 

 ceeded in rearing as many as five hundred queen-cells during 

 one season from one of their best colonies and the entire work 

 was done in the hive occupied by that colony. This colony 

 was kept supplied with a plentiful amount of feed during a 

 scarcity of honey to keep up its breeding and its strength. 



In the manner above mentioned, an unlimited number of 

 queens, if properly cared for, may be raised from the best 

 and most fertile queens. But when the queen-cells are about 

 ready to hatch, the queens must be protected, for the first 

 hatched would at once destroy the others. For this purpose, 

 they use something similar to the queen-nursery of Alley. The 

 nursery used by W. H. Pridgen of North Carolina, described 

 and recommended by W. Z. Hutchinson, in his work "Ad- 

 vanced Bee-culture" and of which we give an engraving, Plate 

 20, is probably the most practical for the purpose, especially 



