>
> 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!
>

The best advice: get the smallest larvae you can.

The bigger the larvae, the greater the chance you'll be rearing an
inter-cast queen, or a "half worker-half queen." Three day old larvae is
too old. But between 0 hrs and 72 hrs it works more like a progressive nob,
where the resulting queen gets more and more like a worker and less and
less like a queen, with fewer ovarioles. And it increases with time at a
non-linear rate. For example, the difference between a larvae that is 1 hr
old and one that is 12 hrs old is nearly zero, as far as I can tell. But
the difference between 24 hr and 48 hr larvae is noticeable, and the
difference between 48 hr and 72 hr is striking. All anecdotal, but you can
read up on some of Dr. Tarpy's work if you want more info.

So the question shouldn't be how small they should be, or how big they can
be, but how small can *you* get?

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html