>> It was not obvious to me if this effect was taken into account, or
>> if this pre-culling between 7 and 28 days -- assuming it took place,
>> as it always does in the real world -
>
> The way I read this, no intervention took place.

Therefore, some of the unfit queens would have naturally have removed
themselves from the ranks of the older queens by the 28 days.  They don't
mention any dead in their cages in the caged ones, either -- that I could
notice.  I wonder how these things were accounted for.

Can we also conclude that any queens that were found to have had poor or bad
patterns, in the mating nuc, were installed into hives anyways?  That runs
counter to what I would expect beekeepers to do.  I'd, personally, have
trouble merrily installing a bum queen into a hive unless explicity told to,
and I can't tell who did the field work -- experimenters or beekeepers --
and I don't see discussion of this problem, so I wonder...

This reminds me that, in the past, queens were sold as virgins, laying
queens, and tested queens, at prices that were lowest for virgins and
highest for tested. Virgins were just that, freshly emerged queens, caged
and mailed.  the laying queens were likely plucked from the nuc around 21
days (As I recall 21 days was about as early as one could expect to find a
new batch laying), and the tested ones were queens that were kept in the nuc
until they had capped brood to be checked for viability -- around 28 days,
in normal weather, I would imagine.

Even in the best experiments, there are things that make a thinking person
wonder...

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/

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