"Not all eggs are made equal. Bad News."

Is this really a big deal?  Does anyone really honestly know for sure if this is a big deal?  If it is a big deal the solution is easy enough.  There may be no trait that has a bigger heredity component and is easier to select for than size.  Just look at what has been accomplished with horses, chickens, turkeys, hogs, cattle, etc.  So, if queen size is really critically important the solution is simple enough.  You simply have a breeder queen selection program that measures all potential breeder queens and only uses the largest.  It probably would not take many generations and you could have some queens with abdomens too big to fit in a worker cell.

As none of the commercial queen breeders are running such a selective breeding operation I suspect simple physical size is of some importance but not critical.  After all, we have all heard the stories about the queen that could zip right thru a queen excluder but was also one of the best queens in the yard.

Dick

HL Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

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