Breeding honey bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) for more rapid development of larvae and pupae

A shorter development time for the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) would allow the parasitic mite Varroa jacobsoni Oudemans less time to reproduce and may provide the bee colony with some resistance to the mite. I developed an accurate way to measure development time, measured variance and heritability of development time of honey bees in Baton Rouge, and determined if colonies with rapidly developing workers produced more rapidly developing queens. Newly hatched larvae were obtained by placing combs that contained eggs into an incubator with no adult workers present. After waiting 1-3 h, newly hatched larvae were identifiable because they had no brood food in their cells. These unfed larvae from different colonies were transferred to a single comb and reared in a nurse colony. Workers (n = 180) from 26 different colonies averaged (mean +/- SD) 114.5 +/- 4.3 h for the uncapped larval period and 285.4 +/- 5.1 h for the capped period. Heritability, +/- SEM was 0.41 +/- 0.15 for the uncapped and 0.61 +/- 0.19 for the capped period. Stocks with rapidly developing workers did not always produce rapidly developing queens (queen-worker regression slope not greater than 0), so workers must be evaluated rather than queens. These data predict that selective breeding from 10% of the population should reduce the mean capped period of workers by 5 h in a single generation