> superceedure could be bred out of queens by the method they were raised.

Doolittle wrote:

> one-half of all the queens that I had in the apiary died, leaving the apiary in poor condition for the honey season, which caused me to meditate a little on what could be the reason for such a whole sale death of my beautiful queens. What seems strange to me now, in looking back over the past, is, that all of these queens died so suddenly, and the bees made no effort at superseding them. They all had brood in abundance for the time of year, and the first I knew that all was not right was when I would find them dead at the entrances of the hives. After this I began to try other plans of queen-rearing

Doolittle concluded that his method of raising queens was faulty and he went on to devise a plan to vastly improve their quality. In fact, his new plan was to mimic supersedure by inducing a normal "queen-right" colony to build queen cells in the upper story over the queen excluder. 

> If there is anything in which I take some little pride it is that since I began to breed my queens for good quality, and for that only, variation of yield of honey from different colonies has grown less and less, till, at the present time, the average yield of honey from each colony in the apiary is very nearly alike, while fifteen years ago some colonies would give 75 percent more honey than would others.

Doolittle actually opposed any attempt to change bees' other predilections:

> we find a disposition in our bees to swarm, and altho during the last century men have tried with great persistency to breed this disposition out, yet so far that disposition stands defiant toward all of these unnatural schemes.  I firmly believe that better results can be obtained where bees swarm than would be the case if we could breed out the swarming-trait.

That is to say IF we could. 

PLB

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