> How did Christine determine the proper amount of be bread etc.?
> Researchers say royal jelly is a factor even in workers. Would small
> cells require less royal jelly?

I don't know about workers, but I do know that if you want good queens, one of
the things you look for in a cell is more than enough royal jelly.  The JayZee
BeeZee cups are good that way, because you can see if the queen ran out of food
before pupating or not.

Perhaps the nurses provide only just enough food to the worker brood -- dunno,
but I know they do overfeed queens.  My assumption has always been that the
amount of feed given has nothing to do with the cell at all, but is dependant on
the number of nurses, the amount of brood, and the nutritional state of the
colony..

> Would a queen be smaller if you removed
> part of the royal jelly or is it only genetics which control size?

Anything is smaller if you don't feed it enough when it is growing.  The
timetable is the same, as are other factors, I should think, regardless of the
container size.  Does a baby get bigger in a bigger crib?

> >Thanks for the info on measuring cell size! To keep the discussion
> simple I chose to list the bees into three categories: small, average
> and bigger thinking beekeepers would give their opinions and the
> researchers would provide the exact smallest and largest cell size by
> the end of the discussion.

FWIW, I have to thank Dee for a lot of the ideas on cell measurement, although I
have to say that I have read her discussion of rhombic measurement ten times and
it still does not make sense to me.  I'll stick with linear measure, thanks.

And also FWIW, I have recently mentioned here -- and in my diary at
http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/ -- that Pierco plastic frames have smaller
cells than I have encountered elsewhere: 5.25 mm rather than the 5.45 which I
have seen in the other samples I have checked lately.  I don't know about their
sheet foundation.

allen
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