> The most interesting thing in that article was that egg weight seems to trump genetics in terms of what gets chosen to make a new queen.

It is almost if the queen "blesses" certain eggs ... perhaps there are nutritional or epigenetic factors added to those eggs. 

> He went as far as to say that instrumental insemination and grafting should be 'phased out', and tried to link these processes to colony collapse. 

Too bad, to take an interesting idea and run with it to that extreme ... shades of Rudolf Steiner. The techniques of queen production have been in use for 100 years, why a sudden change in queen quality?

Be that as it may, I have been interested in exploring an entirely different way of raising queens. It is entirely possible that the conventional ways are not the best. 

We have talked here about "walk away splits" and starting nucs without introducing queens. Recent studies have shown that the idea that bees will raise inferior queens using these methods due to using larvae of the wrong age is false. 

However, the real question is not so much how to avoid inferior queens but how to raise better ones.

PLB

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