> I can't speak for other queen producers, but I would guess that most would be aware of the importance of grafting 1st instar larvae, so I am questioning your claim .

Reply (quoted material):

Interfering with the normal developmental process by switching larvae from a worker to a queen path clearly had consequences for the resulting adults that were detectable at morphological and genetic levels. 

In commercial apiculture, rearing queens from transplanted worker larvae is a standard commercial practice, and the age of the worker larvae used can be anything up to and including 3 days old. In practice, there is a preference to use older worker larvae for transplant as these are more hardy and easier to handle and give a higher success rate. 

There have been long-standing concerns about the consequences of this queen-rearing method for queen quality and colony productivity (Woyke 1971; Thomas 1998; Rangel et al. 2012). 

We propose that the often used commercial queen-rearing practice results in queens of lower quality. As a proximal remedy, rearing queens from eggs or very young larvae may yield a better outcome for queen performance and colony function. 

He, X. J., Zhou, L. B., Pan, Q. Z., Barron, A. B., Yan, W. Y., & Zeng, Z. J. (2017). Making a queen: an epigenetic analysis of the robustness of the honeybee (A pis mellifera) queen developmental pathway. Molecular ecology, 26(6), 1598-1607.

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