almost invariably build queen cells upon the comb thus treated.
This method we have found perfectly satisfactory, but for those who rear queens for sale, other very interesting practices have been invented. The greatest of these was devised by Mr. Doolittle, one of the foremost queen-breeders in America. He makes artificial queen cells by dipping a small, smoothly rounded stick in warm wax repeatedly, thus making a little cup, thin at the edge and thick at the bottom. Rows of these little cups are placed on a bar the thickness of a brood-frame and fastened there with hot wax. In each cup is introduced a bit of royal jelly and a very young larva. The bar is then inserted horizontally into a frame of brood-comb, part of the latter being cut away to give room for the future cells, which project down from the bar. In such a royal nursery, he develops his queens for the market.
INTRODUCING QUEENS
Though royalty in the hive is of quite another feather than in human society, yet there is quite as much ado when it comes to installations in one as in the other. While a bee-colony is absolutely devoted to its own queen, it may seriously object to a queen thrust upon it by some outside power. And thus it happens that the introduction of a new queen into a hive is fraught with danger to her majesty as well as to the pocket-book of the bee-keeper.
