Rex Boys talks about a theory of how a queen determines whether an egg will be
fertilized or not.  His observation is that it appears to be determined by the
diameter of the entrance to the cell--narrow cells resulting in fertilization
and wide cell not triggering fertilization.

I have a couple of thoughts with regard to this theory.  First, it's logical
and makes good sense that it could happen this way.  I like it.  My next
thought was "how could the validity of the theory be determined scientifically,
at least empirically?"  I imagined in my mind that it could take hours and
hours of careful observation of a queen's egg laying to determine whether
the entrance to queen cells was always constricted to worker size at the time
the queen laid in them.  If this is a true phenomenon, it ought to be possible
to observe it consistently.  Then the third thought came to mind:  could
laying a fertilized egg in a queen cup have something to do with the
orientation of the cup (vertical) rather than the size of the cup, and do
queens "automatically" lay fertilized eggs when laying "vertically"?  If the
queen does use her front legs a calipers to determine whether to fertilize an
egg or not, then there could be 3 different sizes that trigger this.  The
smallest would be worker, the next would be drone, and the largest would be
the queen cup.  Again, someone should be able to determine it by painstaking
work and careful observation.  All that said, I like Rex's theory.  It makes
good sense and is satisfying.  Now who will determine whether or not it is
true, and how will they do it?

Layne Westover
College Station, Texas