> I have a question and could not find it in the archives.  Has anyone ever taken a laying worker hive and found some of the laying workers and tried to artificially inseminate them and if they have what were the results.


My friend Tom Glenn, who does this sort of work, replies:

I've never tried it, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. I don't
think workers have a spermatheca to store any sperm, or perhaps just a
vestigial remnant that is non functional. If you want to breed from
laying workers though, their drones are just as functional as from a
queen. They are usually smaller, but that is only if they are raised
in worker cells. Breeding from workers offers some interesting
opportunities for selecting for qualities expressed in workers but not
in queens, like aggression.

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