Thanks, Rick! I thought last weeks blog was also fascinating. When humans graft queens they start with day old larva. When bees raise queens they pick the heaviest eggs and copiously feed the larva from the very start. That leads to a far better queen than we could ever raise.
The apiarist points out that our grafted queen came from a day old worker larva that likely was grown from a grafted worker larva queen that also came from a day old larva and so on, and so on, back again and again. That might be why our queens have so many problems.
The Apiarist has another great post this month about the question of whether worker bees are capable of moving fertilized eggs within the brood nest. This question arose after beekeepers noticed that when a queen is placed into a specific brood frame that is surrounded with a queen-confining cage (usually used when confining a queen to one brood frame to use as an easy source of young larvae when grafting larvae for queen production), that young larvae hatching from fertilized eggs were found outside of the confined queen frame. One may assume this is from a rogue laying worker, but it was noticed that these larvae did not result in a drone (as with a laying worker) but a female worker. Did this result from a worker bee removing a fertilized egg from the frame where the queen was trapped to an open cell on a different frame? Also, an example was put forth to test to see if worker bees are able to transfer a fertilized egg from one cell in the brood chamber to a cell that was earmarked to be constructed into a queen cell during a supersedure event when the hive is intent on replacing it's aging queen. In the long run, this may just be a hypothetical question. But to me, this illustrates the fact that whatever bee behaviors and routines we as beekeepers feel are set in stone, are in reality, never set in stone and that there are many possibilities that occur within the hive environment that we never appreciate. That's what makes beekeeping so interesting; the learning curve never ends.
So maybe sign up for the theapiarist.org posts if you like to challenge your assumptions about beekeeping. It's a science-based forum. The bibliographies that follow these posts are especially well worth your review.
Ref: https://theapiarist.org/do-bees-move-eggs/