Listed as various authors as no doubt you have seen yourself by now.
Indeed - which is why I was rather hoping that someone might have a copy - to clarify which of the authors had written the Long Hive Nuc-Raising article. However, the last 24 hrs have been VERY illuminating indeed ...
My first step at 'sleuthing' was to read a preview of the book at 'Googlebooks'. Now, even though Doolittle is not listed as being an author (the list of authors being given there is incomplete), the article in question does have Doolittle's style about it, AND, in the few pages following the article preview there is a fortuitous comment about the author having submitted a photograph of a novel type of wax cell-cup (which further suggests Doolittle) to GLEANINGS which the Editor ignored.
So, although that photograph wouldn't be present, I thought an Index search of that year's edition (1894) of GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE might be a good place to start hunting, and indeed it was - for by a lucky coincidence, a reader had written-in to GLEANINGS to ask Doolittle's advice - in that he used Long Hives and wished to raise nucs, but couldn't do so by following the methods used in "Scientific Queen-Rearing" (which relate to vertical hives). So from what follows, it appears that the article WAS indeed written by Doolittle.
But there is something about the article in 'Beekeeper's Guide to Rearing Queen Bees' which is a tad 'fishy', in that the article has a heading which reads: "The Author's Original Method of Rearing Successive Batches of Queen-Cells, While Leaving the Fertile Queen", and ends with the (somewhat carefully worded ?) statement that: "The Author has had queens mated on either side of
such excluder dummies for a period dating back prior to 1890, the bees mixing indiscriminately; and therefore he can fully recommend
the plan to his readers."
"The Plan" ? Why not "this Proven System" ? And if this method is so good - why not include it within his book ?
Doolittle's reply to the enquiring reader gives a clue - for he doesn't reply in the form of "this is what I did", or "this is what I found to work" - but rather in the style of "given a Long Hive, this is what I
would do", and he describes at length - not the Long-Hive Nuc-Raising System - but his experiments with centralised brood chambers within Long Hives in which queen-cells were drawn on either side of Queen-Excluders, which then gave him the idea of using QX's above a brood chamber in a vertical hive. Within his reply to that reader, he gives no indication whatsoever that he had successfully raised nucs in the manner described in the 'Beekeeper's Guide to Rearing Queen Bees' article. Curious.
Doolittle does seem to have fallen into the trap of enthusiastically writing about the apparent merits of an experiment before checking that a procedure will continue to work well under all circumstances. There is a good example of this in his book "Scientific Queen-Rearing", which has an addendum of the form: "whoops, it doesn't work" - to which the following extract from his reply to the enquiring reader relates (in which he curiously omits to cite the previously mentioned 'recommended plan' - which is
exactly what the reader is looking for):
" It will be remembered, from what I wrote a few months ago, that there were wide frames of sections between the combs where these cells were reared and the queen-excluding division-boards which kept the young queen in her place, and these wide frames had separators on them which tended to keep the young queen from going to the perforated zinc and quarreling through it with the old queen.
[Thus achieving success accidently, rather than by using double-sided QX's to keep the queens apart, a necessity established later by Doolittle following this failure - LJ]
As I soon became disgusted with the whole plan of long-idea hives, either for the production of comb or extracted honey, the upper-story plan was used as given in my book."
So, Doolittle's
disgust with Long Hives explains perhaps why the Long-Hive Nuc-Raising Plan (or even a Proven System ?), AND his 6-Frame Hive design used for the production of sections (which was actually a Long Hive, dummied-down to 6 frames for winter, with the 2 'wings' on either side of the central 6-(expandable to 9-)frame brood chamber) were never included in his book "Scientific Queen-Rearing", for as both were based around the Long Hive Idea, they simply fell out of fashion with the Author.
In conclusion - so whether these Long-Hive based methods actually work reasonably well in practice, or not, remains anybody's guess ...
LJ
