The most interesting thing in that article was that egg weight seems to trump genetics in terms of what gets chosen to make a new queen.
The suggestion that you could confine the queen you are grafting from so that she lays fewer but heavier eggs is intriguing.
Would it increase the number of grafts started?
I was at a lecture last year given by the geneticist Jacob Kahn. He argued strongly that cryptic female choice takes place with regard to queen selection and that grafting random larvae will produce inferior queens as the larvae chosen naturally by a colony are in some way 'special'. He went as far as to say that instrumental insemination and grafting should be 'phased out', and tried to link these processes to colony collapse.
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