I asked> what is the Hopkins Case method?

And Aaron was kind enough to respond:
  "A graftless method of raising queens.

  See:
  http://beesource.com/pov/hayes/abjmay91.htm "

Hi Aaron and all you digital beekeeping mentors.  I'd like to reconnect to a
discussion we had a while ago.

I read this document about the Hopkins method and it's really interesting.
As a matter of fact, i had heard of this method from an old beekeeper over
here, but i had forgotten about it.

Are any of you using this method? I have a couple of questions:

-How do you place a whole frame horizontally in the hive. I assume this
requires some sort of extra gadget..?
-Do you have to place the frame in the middle of the hive (between brood
boxes and supers), or will this work just as well in the top part of the
hive?
-What happens with the upper part of the horizontal frame? Do the bees
remove the larva there?
-Don't you get a lot of burr comb around the cells?
-Why do you remove the cells right after they're capped and not the day
before they hatch?
-When you remove a frame with this many cells, of course it takes a while to
cut them all out and go around and place them in all those colonies. How do
you store the cut out cells during this time to make sure there is no
temperature och motion related damage to them?
-When the bees build comb on a queen cell, is the cell still OK if i cut
away the unwanted wax?

Oh, by the way, i said i'd update you on the dropped queen cell frame of
mine. The eight queen cells on the frame that i dropped resulted in one
single queen. All the other cells contained nothing (they were still capped
and looked fine) or a little dead larva.

However, i am not sure dropping the frame was the problem. I have tried to
raise queens for three consecutive summers with the same results in many
cases - plenty of cells, but only an undeveloped larva inside them. I follow
the instructions from a book that i have and what i've found on the net, but
i have no clue why this happens. Any suggestions? I suspect i am doing
something wrong when i transfer the one-day-old larva to the feeder colony.
I use the Jenter system, so there really isn't much that can go wrong...

/Mats Andersson, Stockholm Sweden