>
> >Maybe Randy will chime in,  but my takeaway was that its much more in
> depth than just diet.


Crazy busy here--we're making up 500 nucs a week, plus producing hundreds
of queen cells for sale.  Am trying to keep up with those of you who appear
to have time on your hands : )

I've been in deep discussion with a top queen researcher over the past few
weeks as far as experimental designs and the direction that funding should
take to try to figure out why folk are claiming poor successful
suspersedure (resulting in colonies going queenless), as well as
questioning much of our "common knowledge" regarding queen pheromones,
triggers for cell building, worker choice of larvae (very interesting
as-yet unpublished data), causes of queen failure, diet, composition of
royal jelly as opposed to worker jelly, etc.  We both feel that there is
much misinformation and erroneous beliefs out there.

As far as Bill's question re queen longevity, diet appears to be a major
factor.  However, diet also greatly shifts the expression of genes,
resulting in both phenotypic change (worker or queen morphology) as well as
physiological differences (degree of fat body production, shifts in immune
and body maintenance functions).

As I wrote about in a recent article, I suspect that there is programmed
senescence in summer workers.  Diutinus workers can live far longer, and
queens the longest.  Queens have the advantage of optimal diet as well as
phenotype, a different gut microbiota, do not produce jelly, rarely fly,
etc.  Their effective lifespan is largely limited by the number of
spermatozoa that they can keep alive in their spermatheca.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

             ***********************************************
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