"This new work is interesting from a scientific point of view, but that's it"
From a practical standpoint if queen morphology was actually vitally important (things like weight, thorax size, number of ovarioles, etc) everyone in the US would be running only breeder queens from Latshaw as Tarpy's measurements show his queens are in a morphological class all by themselves.  Do, not get me wrong.  I think Joe's breeder queens are excellent.  But I am not at all convinced that excellent makes them measurably better than other peoples breeder queens.  Joe has been selecting for large queens now for thirty or more years.  He has a degree in genetics so likely understands what a real breeding program entails and how to conduct such a program.  It is reasonable to expect his queens to have size.  You get what you select for.

This idea that morphology may not be all that important, at least above some base size, is borne out by a paper by Tarpy:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-coefficients-for-the-nine-measurements-of-queen-quality-There-were-no-strong_tbl2_248023588  

Besides there also is a practical limit on what we can do.  Queen producers need to provide a product at a competitive price.  Can some queen producer sell his queens for $200 each to commercial bee keepers, even if they are measurably better, if the competition is selling queens at $20 in batches of 500?  Not everyone needs a Lamborghini quality queen heading their hive.  Back yard bee keepers kill probably half the queens they buy due to mishandling in my experience.  So, they are not likely to pay ten times more either.

Dick


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