> Thanks Pete, the experiment you cited came close, but was not the experiment I proposed.

As you can imagine, there is a ton of data on this topic, much of it conflicting. Nevin Weaver seems to have been very keen on sorting it out. For those who don't know, here's a brief excerpt taken from Kirk Webster's web page

> Nevin Weaver; brother of Binford and Roy Jr.; of the famous beekeeping Weaver family from Navasota, Texas. Nevin started off in the family bee business, but then decided to continue in school and work eventually as a scientist. He was the first person to raise a worker bee, from egg to adult, in a petrie dish---sleeping on a cot in the lab, so the larvae could be fed every few hours. He was teaching Physiology at U Mass, Boston, when I met him one night at a county bee club meeting. He didn't make his living from beekeeping, but he stayed close to his family and Weaver Apiaries, and he and his wife Betsy spent the summers in Navasota. He did many research projects, without getting heavily involved in the funding rat-race, simply by using the family's bees and facilities during his summer vacations. 

http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/some-great-mentors

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