My expertise in breeding is not in plants or daylilies.
I have bred poultry for 5 decades.
Mostly pair mating and use line breeding as well as in breeding.
What I have found out is that even after staying within strain for over 3 decades recessives genetics still crop up. This is within an established bloodline.
I had the opportunity to breed what is called a land race.
To keep it simple they wouldn't breed true and even pair mating two birds that looked the same one could end up with 10 different colors and type in 10 chicks.
Genetics bouncing all over the place.
Without knowing parents grandparents and great grandparents it's going to be hard to determine characteristics of offspring.
I am no expert on plant genetics but the way daylilies are bred I would think that the mixture of genes would effect any pundit square projections.
Not saying it can't happen but would be more inclined to believe mix in gene pool than everything being blamed on bee pollen variations.
I would venture to guess that almost no one now or in past enclose each flower after hand pollen application.
Everyone breeds the way they want and decides how to use offspring.
Don't mean to step on anyone's toes just have had different results than others.
Posting picture of seedling several generations from top branch low bud count yellow bloom.
This is the best one sorted from several years of about 150 seedlings.

That is a beautiful scape!

@edgar
Have you ever discussed your crosses and their results with a professional geneticist?

Not saying it can't happen but would be more inclined to believe mix in gene pool than everything being blamed on bee pollen variations.

That depends completely on the particular daylily.

Some diploid daylilies are self-compatible. That means they will produce seeds from their own pollen. Other diploid daylilies are not self-compatible. Some daylilies have flowers that are often visited by insects while others have flowers that are seldom visited by insects. Some daylilies have flowers in which the anthers are relatively close to the stigma while others have anthers which are further away from the stigma. Some diploid daylilies have flowers that produce pods without any hybridizer having hand-pollinated them.

That means the hybridizer must be wary of what they think is the parentage of the seedlings they produce depending on the characteristics of the parents and they methods they used in making their crosses.

What I have found out is that even after staying within strain for over 3 decades recessives genetics still crop up

That can certainly happen if the appropriate crosses have not been made in the previous generations. However, one cannot get the "dominant" characteristic appearing when crosses are made between two parents showing genetically the same recessive characteristic. One can however get the "dominant" characteristic appearing in some of the offspring when crosses are made between two parents that although they appear to be showing the same recessive characteristic are actually only showing the same phenotypic characteristic and it is genetically different in each parent.

Edgar - I appreciate your insights!

"I would venture to guess that almost no one now or in past enclose each flower after hand pollen application"

Or before hand pollination, since an insect could have got there first.

There is recent research that can be used to show that insects (or otherwise) do manage to pollinate some
daylily flowers even though hybridizers have hand pollinated them.
A daylily hybridizer crossed diploids with tetraploids and tetraploids with diploids to produce triploids for some research. The researchers determined whether the seedlings produced from the crosses were triploids but found that some were diploids and some were tetraploids. That means something other than the hand pollination of the hybridizer produced those seedlings - insects or errors by the hybridizer at some stage of the process. The most likely is natural pollinations by insects. They were responsible for 16% of the seedlings.

The percentage is likely to be much higher in specific cases where natural insect pollinations are more likely due to the characteristics of the particular daylily.

"They were responsible for 16% of the seedlings." Oh man, that is just depressing!

sooby said:Or before hand pollination, since an insect could have got there first.

Actually an insect could have gotten to the pollen that the hybridizer collects from a flower to use in pollinating another flower. When insects visit a flower they may contaminate the pollen of that flower with pollen from a different flower that the insect had visited previously.

So to be safe and certain that seeds produced by a hand pollination were from the pollen used by the hybridizer, the entire stamen or anther should be collected before any insect can visit the flower and possibly contaminate the pollen (of the pollen parent to be used in the cross).

Those working with diploid daylilies that are genetically not far removed from the original species in characteristics should be aware that the closer a daylily is to the original characteristics the more likely it is to have an intact "pollination syndrome". Those are all the characteristics that evolved naturally to form the partnership between the plant and its pollinator so that the plant could successfully produce seeds. That means the chance that insects naturally pollinate a daylily flower is higher the fewer generations ago a cross with a species plant was made in the ancestry of the pod parent.

I wasn't going to respond to comments on pollen transferred by insects the majority of the time.
When I consider the progress that has been by Hybridizers I feel that stating most of the offspring was at off chance of insects or self pollen before being hand bred.
I am not going to spout off information about how it is impossible to make the progress made by breeders.
Here's a webpage called Hemerocallis Species Home page.
If you spend the time to study each Hemerocallis Species that was brought back to the United States you will begin to understand what genetics were available to begin breeding with.
From this small genetic pool the modern daylilies have evolved.
I am not going to argue back and forth or down play what has been accomplished by Hybridizers over the years.
I have given you the name of the website where you can read and make an intelligent decision based on experts on daylily species.
Warning it is not light reading.
I think you will find it interesting and appreciate more the Hybridizers progress that we build on today.

I have thought long and hard about writing this post and possibly causing this thread to continue being read and producing misleading comments.
It is clear to me that Edgar has misinterpreted and misunderstood my posts. I make posts that are usually only about science and are factual and which usually do not have any of my opinions. Yet there are comments in some of these posts that appear to be about my opinions. In fact, they are not about my opinions but are based on inappropriate assumptions being made about my factual statements.

I did not intend to continue posting since I consider that anyone may believe whatever they wish to believe. I try to deal only with science and what is known and accepted as facts by science. Once I am aware that someone may not accept scientific facts then I consider that the value in commenting on their posts is to provide the scientific factual side to other readers.

This post will examine various previous posts and provide the scientific reasoning and where necessary will correct any erroneous assumptions about my opinions.

The initial observation by Edgar
" I have always felt that Stella de Oro was underutilized as gene pool.
I crossed her selfed.
Pollen and Pod parent were same bloom."
and
" Even in breeding that close the offspring were all over as far as the following:"
and
"Color the light yellow to golden yellow didn't surprise me. The various shades of red and some with eyes did."

Many of us know Mendel's Laws. One of them is the law of dominance. We either accept that law or we believe something different and do not accept it. Arisumi, a research geneticist, did the daylily crosses to examine the inheritance of red and yellow flower colours in daylilies. He determined that red is dominant to yellow flower colour which also means that yellow flower colour is recessive to red flower colour. That means pollinating a yellow flower with pollen from a yellow flower cannot produce seedlings that have any red in their flowers if we accept Mendel's law of dominance - it can only produce yellow seedlings.

Genetically a diploid yellow flowered daylily would be yy. Self-pollinating a diploid yellow flowered daylily or crossing two diploid yellow flowered daylilies with each other would be yy X yy and can only produce yy seedlings - yellow flowered daylilies. A diploid red flowered daylily can be genetically Yy or YY. Yellow flowered daylilies such as Stella de Oro do not have the Y allele and cannot produce red in the flowers of their seedlings from self-pollinations.

If we do not accept that law then we can believe whatever we like.

We cannot say anything about the parentage of any of the yellow seedlings because hand self pollinations of Stella de Oro x Stella de Oro will produce yellow flowered seedlings and natural cross pollinations of Stella de Oro x any unknown diploid yellow flowered daylilies will also produce yellow flowered seedlings.

We know that Stella de Oro can produce pods and seeds without being hand pollinated. That is a fact. That means that natural pollinations can and do occur. If seedlings produced from pods by self pollinations have red in their flowers they were not produced by pollen from Stella - they were not produced by the hand pollinations. They were produced by natural insect pollinations. They were not produced by self pollinations. They were produced by natural cross-pollinations.

We can accept that, if we accept Mendel's law of dominance or we can deny it and believe whatever we would like to believe.

There is only one conclusion that follows from that - it is that the parentage of the seedlings with any red in their flowers is not Stella de Oro x Stella de Oro. The parentage is Stella de Oro x Unknown. That is a factual conclusion. It is not an opinion. We can accept it or not accept it and believe anything we want.

That factual conclusion does not provide any information about my opinion of hybridizers or hybridizing. It is, in fact, completely irrelevant to my opinion of hybridizers or hybridizing.

In later posts I provided a factual estimate of the percentage of seeds that were produced in crosses that were likely to have been from natural pollinations and that natural pollinations are more likely when the plants are genetically close to the original species and less likely the more generations that separate daylilies from their species ancestors. Those are factual observations. They are not opinions. None of those facts can be interpreted to mean that hand pollinations do not produce any seedlings with a desired parentage. Those factual observations do not provide any information about my opinions of hybridizers or hybridizing. Nor do they have any effect on my opinions of hybridizers or hybridizing.

None of the facts that I posted imply anything about my opinions regarding hybridizers or hybridizing.

There are daylily enthusiasts who do not hand pollinate the daylilies in their gardens. They collect the seeds from naturally produced pods and plant them. They may register some of those seedlings. Why not? That is perfectly fine. People have been doing the same thing with our crop plants for thousands of years. When a daylily hybridizer hand pollinates a daylily flower without taking any precautions to prevent possible natural pollinations they accept the risk that some of the seedlings may not be from their hand pollinations. That is also perfectly fine. In most crosses it is not possible to estimate how many seedlings might be from natural pollinations. There is only one significant conclusion to that. It means that the parentage provided when a seedling from such a cross is registered has a chance of being incorrect. How much of a chance is unknown. That depends on how often the particular pod parent is naturally pollinated and what the hybridizer might possibly have done, if anything, to reduce those chances. If some of the seedlings are from natural pollinations it does not mean all of the seedlings might be. One also has to understand that if the cross involved a species daylily as the pod parent there might be more seeds produced by a natural pollination than if the pod parent was a more modern cultivar. That still does not mean that every seed in every pod was from a natural pollination. It is not correct to assume that. Crosses between modern cultivars may have a negligible chance of producing pods from natural pollinations or they may not.

Again, none of those facts can be used to imply anything about my opinions of hybridizing and hybridizers.

Daylily hybridizers simply need to be aware that some of their seedlings may not have the parentage that they think they have based on their hand pollinations. And that is not the end of the world. Hybridizing is not only based on making hand pollinations. There are many parts to hybridizing. Selecting which plants to grow or introduce is one of those parts. That can be done with seedlings produced from natural pollinations and it can be done with seedlings produced from hand pollinations. Not being 100.0% certain of the parentage does not change that hybridizing is more than hand pollinating a daylily flower.

So what is the gist of this post and of my previous posts on this topic?

1) It is that if you read that a daylily with red in its flower has two yellow flowered parents then you know that the parentage is incorrect.

2) That if you assume that EVERY seedling you grow was produced by your hand pollinations made in natural conditions and you did not use "safe" hybridizing methods as Whatley (clickable) wrote about, (and both professional geneticists and professional plant breeders use) then that is incorrect.

None of the scientific facts I have posted about nor any of the conclusions based on them have anything to do with my opinions about hybridizers or hybridizing and anyone implying or suggesting that they do is stating their own misinterpretations, opinions, or beliefs - not mine.

Maurice, I believe in science and scientific facts. I agree with all that you stated, and I appreciate your contribution.

I always read your postings carefully, and I like learning from your postings.

I find it very interesting to read the registered information and notice that one or both parents are "unknown" and yet, said plant may be very expensive because of its characteristics.

Thank you.

I'm so glad you wrote this post Maurice and thanks for the link.