Also the difference between dips and tets has more significance to a hybridizer than a home gardener who is just growing for fun or personal enjoyment. You probably have heard that it is easier to hybridize with dips than tets for desired daylily traits. This is true because each dip has only 2 sets of chromosomes (one from the pod and one from the pollen) while each tet cell has 4 sets of chromosomes for the same characteristic. Suppose you are working on to hybridize a daylily with a rare trait that is recessive. If the parents of the cross contain these recessive gene, then the probability of you getting an offspring that contains only recessive genes from both parent is 25% for a dip but only 2.7% for a tet. Thus it is much harder and require more work to get a desired trait to express on a tet daylily than a dip.
THese diagrams are taken from Daru Sharp's presentation on daylily genetics and how it plays in producing broken color, striping, and stippling daylilies.
