Shi's findings support the hypothesis that development of any female
larva into queen physiology is the default.  It is only by methylation of
critical genes that full development is suppressed, thus resulting in a
female developing into a worker instead.


This statement caught my attention. I see them as two sides of the same coin. But we may be splitting hairs, here.

> Honeybee workers and queens are two very different phenotypes that come about as a result of divergent developmental pathways. Environmental differences in growing space and nutrition cause the divergence, and the two pathways are organized by epigenetic processes(Haydak 1970; Shi et al. 2011; Foret et al. 2012). 

> In summary, we could conclude that the queen developmental pathway is quite robust. The queen phenotype could be attained even by 3-day-old worker larvae (the larval developmental period is just 5 days long) and therefore developmental trajectory is certainly not fixed until relatively late in larval development. 

He, Xu Jiang, et al. "Making a queen: an epigenetic analysis of the robustness of the honeybee (Apis mellifera) queen developmental pathway." Molecular ecology 26.6 (2017): 1598-1607.

also

> in honey bees a silencing of the expression of the DNA methyltransferase DNMT3 redirects the larval developmental trajectory towards queens, mimicking the effect of royal jelly (Kucharski et al., 2008). These authors suggest that the gene dynactin p62 plays a key role in regulating alternate developmental trajectories, based on different methylation patterns in queens compared to workers.

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