Hi all
This just out, researchers including Dave Tarpy have published results from supplemental feeding of developing larvae leading to "improved" queen bees:

> We found that the application of a sugar-enriched diet in combination with JH application onto 1st instar queen larvae produced higher-quality queens, while for 3rd instar larvae only the JH treatment resulted in increasing queen quality. For mated queens, those treated with JH plus supplemented sugars showed a significantly higher sperm count and sperm viability. Our findings demonstrate that honey bee queen reproductive potential can be increased through diet supplementation.

> The common practice for commercial queen rearing is to visually select the smallest (youngest) larvae for grafting. Although this practice already yields high-quality queens (Tarpy et al. 2012; Rangel et al. 2013), we show here that it is possible to achieve even higher- quality queens by providing a sugar-rich royal jelly supplement into the queen cells along with JH application.

> The direct implications of our findings has the potential for further improvement of queen quality will not only benefit commercial queen breeders but it may also help the commercial pollination industry that rely on queen breeders to supply replacement queens.

Daiana, A., HUANG, M. H., & TARPY, D. R. (2018) Experimental improvement of honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen quality through nutritional and hormonal supplementation. Apidologie, 1-14.

comment:
I am skeptical that queen breeders will swiftly adopt any new practices, but this is intriguing to contemplate

PLB

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