HERITABILITY OF THE QUEEN BROOD POST-CAPPING STAGE DURATION OF APIS-MELLIFERA-MELLIFERA L)

The short duration of the post-capping stage of the honey bee is consi dered as a good trait to select for breeding honey bees resistant to V arroa jacobsoni. One way to operate is to apply this selection to quee ns, 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 i ntra-class correlation in a population of Apis mellifera mellifera col onies in France; and (2) the regression between daughter-workers to mo ther-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), suggest ing that queen selection could be efficient at obtaining workers with short capping durations. As the reduction of worker capping period can induce a decrease in the Varroa mite populations, selection for short -capping-duration queens to obtain Varroa-resistant strains is discuss ed.