Heritability of the queen brood post-capping stage duration in Apis mellifera mellifera L

Abstract

The short duration of the post-capping stage of the honey bee is considered as a good trait to select for breeding honey bees resistant to Varroa jacobsoni. One way to operate is to apply this selection to queens, since this character is expressed in the 3 castes. To predict the efficiency of such a selection, we estimated: (1) the heritability of this character through daughter-queen to mother- queen regression and intra-class correlation in a population of Apis mellifera mellifera colonies in France; and (2) the regression between daughter-workers to mother-queens. The heritabilities obtained with these methods were 0.31 ± 0.10 and 0.22 ± 0.25 respectively. The worker capped period was positively correlated with the mother-queen period (r=0.59), suggesting that queen selection could be efficient at obtaining workers with short capping durations