> Wonder if confining a queen to empty drawn comb, punching out cells with eggs instead of hatched larvae, and transferring those punched cells to cell starter colonies would improve initial dietary issues for newly hatched larvae destined to become queens.

I am just reading about that technique

Gusev in Russia was the first to transfer the cell bottom together with
the egg, and he demonstrated his method at the Exhibition of 1860.
Several variants have been tried since, but the rate of acceptance was
always low. The following method was tried in 1958; unlike the others, it
proved successful. The larva is removed from an accepted and lavishly
fed queen cell when about 2 days old; a disc is punched out from the
bottom of a worker cell containing an egg and transferred to the queen
cell instead. The small disc covers up the disturbed brood food, and its
edge sinks slightly into it so it does not seem like a foreign body. (Bees
often put food into a cell where an egg is shortly due to hatch.)

Experiments with 543 queens have shown that the average number of ovarioles was greater in
queens reared 'from the egg' than in queens reared from grafted larvae.
This difference was statistically significant.

M. A. Alber (1965) A Study of Queen-Rearing Methods, Bee World, 46:1, 25-31

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