Effects of intracolonial genetic diversity on honey bee (Hymenoptera : Apidae) colony performance

Honey bee colonies having varied genetic diversity were produced from five inbred lines. One line was used as a queen mother of 62 experimental colonies. These queens were inseminated with various combinations of semen obtained from single colonies of the remaining four lines. In estimating colony performance, the seasonal weight gain and mean brood area of colonies comprising two or three subfamilies were compared with those of colonies comprising a single subfamily. Some specific combinations of subfamilies reduced colony performance, whereas others enhanced it. The results suggest that present methods for estimating quantitative genetic parameters in honey bees may be inexact approximations because they fail to take into account the effects of interactions among subfamilies, which may be quite large. Some consequences of these subfamily interactions for honey bee breeding programs are discussed.