Heritability of Worker Characters in the Honeybee (Apis mellifera)

Abstract

Heritability of characters (e.g. hamuli number) of honeybee workers can be estimated from data obtained from a random sample of colonies from a single population without the need for controlled matings. Formulae are developed for the estimation of relatedness among workers within colonies as a function of number of drone matings with the queen and the relatedness among these drones. Heritability is then estimated by dividing the intraclass correlation of the character by the relatedness among the workers within colonies. Estimates obtained by this method are shown to be considerably less biased than those obtained by analysing data from single-drone inseminations because of the contribution of dominance variance to the covariance of sib workers.