Investigating Genetic and Phenotypic Variability of Queen Bees: Morphological and Reproductive Traits

The quality of the honeybee queen has an important effect on a colony's development,productivity, and survival. Queen failure or loss is considered a leading cause for colonies' mortalityworldwide. The queen's quality, resulting from her genetic background, developmental conditions,mating success, and environment, can be assessed by some morphological measures. The study aimsto investigate variability for traits that could assess the quality of the queen. Related animals wereenrolled in this study. Variance components were estimated fitting a mixed animal model to collecteddata. Heritabilities of body and tagmata weights ranged from 0.46 to 0.54, whereas lower estimates werefound for the tagmata width and wing length. Heritabilities estimated for the spermatheca diameterand volume, number of ovarioles, and number of sperms were 0.17, 0.88, 0.70, and 0.57, respectively.Many phenotypic correlations related to size were high and positive, while weak correlations werefound between morphology and reproductive traits. Introducing a queen's traits in a selection programcould improve colonies' survivability. Further research should focus on better defining the correlationsbetween the individual qualities of a queen and her colony's performance.