Breeding Values in Honey Bees

Introduction This article continues our series on the basics of honey bee breeding (Uzunov et al., 2017, 2022a, 2022b). Its purpose is to introduce the background and application of breeding values in honey bees to a readership that is not trained in quantitative genetics. Breeding values are currently not widely used in honey bee breeding. This is in contrast to farm animals, where nearly all breeding programs make use of breeding values. The limited use of breeding values in honey bees has various reasons. One reason is that many honey bee programs just aim at the multiplication of stock obtained from other breeders instead of gradually improving the population. However, for honey bee breeding programs that aim to improve the population, not using breeding values seems a missed opportunity. A second reason is that the use of breeding values is more complicated in honey bees than in farm animals. This is because controlled mating is a challenge (Uzunov et al., 2022b), and queens are mated to several drones from multiple queens. Moreover, traits like honey yield and varroa resistance are not measured on single bees but on colonies as a group of related individuals (known as superorganism) from two generations (mother and daughters).