Delicate larvae.

[Jon]

Curiously enough I had a conversation with fatshark about this very theme at the SNHBS conference last weekend.
The thing about placing them the right way up and the blocked spiracles blah blah blah seems to be something that started within Bibba. It's likely in one of the Beo Cooper or Mobus books but is just another old wives tale which gets endlessly propagated. They usually come off the paintbrush the same way up anyway.
In my experience larvae are quite resilient and are most easily damaged by drying out.
Having said that I have grafted into cell cups at one apiary and filled a tupperware container with them then cycled 6 miles to another apiary with the larvae jiggling about in the Tupperware. Most of them got started when placed in the cell raiser colony. The ancient bicycle in question was not equipped with any James Bond style self generating high humidity system or any other defense systems associated with a perilous activity such as moving larvae from one place to another.

[busybeephilip]

grafting via vibration, do you get better queens that way ?

[mbc]

Despite larvae being resilient I work on the principle that once chosen as queens they're visited incredibly frequently by nurse bees so it's best not to get in the way of the natural process.
@Jon lol, it's nice to hear environmentally friendly solutions to transport problems are used in the pressure cooker environment of queen rearing on the emerald isle.

[Jon]

Yep, it is far more important to have the recipient colony packed with nurse bees than to worry too much about the grafting process.

[prakel]

1. Less delicate than you imagine. But that doesn't mean you should be rough You should have lots to choose from, so if there's doubt about whether they've been knocked about a bit, choose another.

Perfect advice!

4. They don't have to go down the same way. Look for the you-tube vids of people washing them out of cells in the hundreds, chucking them into a tray and grafting them ... there's no way they retain the same orientation.

It might be illuminating to actually have twenty or thirty queens that were raised in such a manner running alongside equal numbers of queens raised from larvae treated in a better way... But I don't suppose that would be a fair test because the chances are that someone who treats the larvae in such a cavalier way probably has other equally dubious 'shortcuts' built into the rearing process.