Hi all
There has been a lot of work done on queen rearing, both by the bees themselves and the artificial methods that are employed by queen producers. Most of it focuses on the age of the larvae, the care and feeding, etc. I was reading through a recent article which seemed to be pretty up to date and informed. They state:

> Kucharski et al. (2008) reported that nutritional differences between queen and worker at their larval stage control their development via DNA methylation.

> Woyke (1971) reported that rearing queens from young worker larvae resulted in decreased body size, a smaller spermatheca and fewer ovarioles.

> Rangel et al. (2012) reported that colonies from queens reared from older worker larvae had significantly lower production of worker comb, drone comb and stored food compared with colonies from queens reared from young worker larvae.

These are standard references, but then they added this:

> In 1923, Rudolf Steiner predicted that honeybees would become extinct within 100 years as a consequence of commercial queen rearing progressively weakening bee stocks.

That set off the alarm bell for me. Why quote Steiner in a scientific work? Are they daft? This is the sort of thing he says:

> The whole hive is in reality permeated with love. The individual bees renounce love in manifold ways, and thus develop love throughout the whole hive. One only begins to understand the life of the bees when one knows that the bee lives in an atmosphere completely pervaded by love. 

> On the other hand the bee is quite especially favoured by the fact that, in its turn, it feeds upon just those parts of the plants which are also wholly pervaded by love. The bees suck out their food — which they then turn into honey — exclusively from those parts of the plants that are centred in love; they bring, so to speak, the love-life of the flowers into the hive. 

> With the exception of the Queen, the bees are actually beings which, as I would like to put it, say to themselves “We will renounce the individual sexual life that we make ourselves ‘bearers of love.’” Thus they have been able to bring what lives in the flowers into the hive; and when you begin really to think this out rightly, you will reach the whole mystery of the bee-hive. 

> Hence one must say that the life of the bees must be studied by making use of the soul. 

¶

So, when they issue their conclusions, I am already wondering whether these people really know what they are on about:

> Our study clearly showed that the domestic rearing practice artificially transformed the nutrition and developmental space of queen larvae and resulted in a partial intercaste between queen and workers. We also demonstrated that the domestic rearing practice altered natural honeybee maternal behaviour, inducing various epigenetic changes. Moreover, we propose that the often used commercial queen-rearing practice results in queens of lower quality. 

PLB

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