I also follow the general standard of practice that I learned from all the helpful commercial and home hybridizers who've documented their work on the internet - removing anthers and, for me at least, identifying parentage. Though I agree that it is not possible to always be sure of viable fertility rates or a seedling's parentage, most daylilies would be thrown into question if random insect pollination were the prevailing mode of genetic transmission. My experience with self crossing is like Seeds, with great results up to 30% of the time on both older and newer varieties of all colors. On the other hand, perhaps I have missed seeing that modern hybridizer's are truly using a "clean room" technique in common practice - I would cherish some linked pointers to their visual documentation of it. Even without clean room techniques, with the great diversity and complexity of today's cultivars, most registered daylilies do seem to carry some resemblance to any stated parentage, in those dwindling cases where parentage information is provided or seedling-parent names documented.
I'll be posting pictures of my parent-and-self-offsprings by next summer (fingers crossed!). Though I started out closer to full-on "clean room" technique my first year, it hasn't seem to differ in result for the few cultivars that I approached more casually. And, the process really does not seem to have been implemented much outside a lab, based on the extremely high number of recent cultivars in the past couple of decades that have unknown parentage or parentage that dates only a few generations back. Though the practices that lead to massive loss of parental information can perhaps create personal control over access to information about the hybridizer's own cultivar choices, it forever wipes out important relevant information about health, performance, and background information like color, form, and historical continuity. With thousands of crosses each year, I can understand why there would be less detailed information kept, but from what I understand most commercial hybridizers segregate each cultivar in its own area, and pollinate with one pollen cross at a time, a simple process to document.
I've also had no luck with Prairie Blue Eyes in any kind of dip-crossing (if pods set they abort) and it seems most of its offspring were produced pre-1980's. If I were more interested in it as a parent cultivar I'd try what I did when Dixie Land Band produced no viable pods ... cross it with the "wrong" ploidy and learn that it really could not be called a dip, at least not the fans in my garden. It was quite fond, however, of tets and made tons of seedlings that are among those growing on my potting bench.
I'll assume those red "dip" cultivars are not of interest to geneticists, but they are gracing this garden with a lot of interesting experiences. The more we learn the less we may know, it sometimes seems, but the more we encourage and try, the more things tend to advance and benefit us all.
