> Wei et al. show that honeybee queens selectively lay larger eggs in queen cells to be raised by workers as queens. Egg size influences both gene expression and the adult weight of the queen. 


An oocyte starts at the very top of an ovariole and progressively grows, with the help of a nurse cell, until at the end it enters the oviduct where it goes through its last division and becomes an egg. With a fecund laying queen, this is happening about five times per day for each ovariole multiplied by as many as 350-450 ovarioles, which in total can produce a constant stream of as many as 1000-2000 eggs per day.  In my experience, rapid and prolonged egg laying leads to somewhat smaller eggs. On the contrary, during restrictive laying one can observe somewhat larger eggs. So I'm left with the question of how it would it be possible for a queen to just start laying larger eggs on demand in the midst of routine egg laying. If in fact, her eggs are larger for queen cells some restrictive laying would need to occur prior to laying so the biology of oogenesis could be allowed to produce larger oocytes.  

Here's what the study says about the above.

>, we propose that fecund queens at any one time have more than one egg ready for laying and that queens may lay the largest available egg in queen cells. 

Comment- To be blunt, it seems like a stretch that a queen could feel a larger egg somewhere in the process and hold that larger egg for a queen cell, but human reasoning is often inadequate in these matters. 

They continue:  

> Alternatively, queens may pause oviposition prior to laying in queen cells, since delaying oviposition causes bigger eggs with more yolk protein [37], but this possibility needs to be investigated.

Comment- It's not clear in the study that they halted the queen's laying.  From my reading, it was the cell size that prompted larger eggs which leads to their main argument that epigenetics is not totally responsible from queens and may be complemented by the queen's ability to initiate phenotypic plasticity at the level of an individual egg - a stunning discovery if it's true. 


I tried the Nicot system this year and I'm getting good results growing queen cells from eggs.  What I noticed is that really fecund queens will sometimes lay more than one egg per Nicot cell because they are restricted to an area of only 110 cells and she apparently just keeps going after the first round. I leave them in the Nicot box for 24hrs and the cells with two eggs have different size eggs. I've assumed the larger ones were a result of the queen being restricted.  Since I'm only using 20-30 of the eggs, I select the largest most perfectly laid eggs I can find. Maybe I'll let the next round go for 72 hours and see what size egg I get. 


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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