Heritability of sting characters in africanized honeybees

ABSTRACT

In this paper we proposed to estimate the heritability of seven morphological characters that compose the sting apparatus of the Africanized honeybee workers. An experimental design to estimate genetic parameters was based on the method developed by Oldroyd and Moran. This method was modified to eliminate within-colony envinronmental effects associated with the additive genetic variance. The estimated h2 values ranged from 0.74 ñ 0.11 (maximum width of bulb of sting and height of the valve of right lancet) to 0.74 ñ 0.30 (length of the lancet).