There was a bit in one of the Ontario Bee Journals a year or two ago on using alfalfa (?) sprouts as a proxy for newly hatched larvae. They were teaching basic grafting technique using the sprouts in cells.

With my aging eyes I have to use a magnifying headset, and I recommend practice be done using one as it takes a few minutes for your brain to get used to the disconnect between what your hands have to do and what you are seeing through the lenses. Nice to have a headset or two for the class attendees to try out.

All that said, I find the very smallest larvae really hard to pick up and transfer without flipping/distorting them. The big question for me is: what is the cutoff for size before they are too big to make great queens? Or to put it another way, what I need to know is not how small they should be but how big they can be!

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