Reply to thread

Welcome to NZ Beekeepers+

Would you like to join the rest of our members? Feel free to sign up today.

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alastair" data-source="post: 13987" data-attributes="member: 13">Thanks for the link Jose, I did read the whole article a while back.Got to say though, any reasonable beekeeper would have observed the way queen cells are constructed with their very porous construction to allow plenty of ventilation for the larva. I sometimes read about these "scientific breakthroughs" and wonder why it takes a team of scientists with a financial grant to "discover" something that is fairly common knowledge among industry professionals even if it has not been formally committed to paper. I'm not just talking about beekeeping, this happens across the board.A different study that perhaps had more value, queen bees were raised in an incubator in artificial cells, and fed royal jelly collected not from queen cells, but from worker cells. IE, it was the royal jelly fed to worker larvae. The larvae developed into queens as long as they were fed enough. So it was proposed that the old idea that royal jelly fed to queen larvae is different to the royal jelly fed to queen larvae not likely to be true, the deciding factor is the quantity. My own view is the porousness or otherwise of the queen cell is incidental, and not the deciding factor that makes the larva become a queen. Having said all that, of course I am not a scientist LOL.</blockquote>

Top