Summary — The short duration of the post-capping stage of the honey bee is considered as a good trait to select for breeding honey bees resistant to Varroa jacobsoni. One way to operate is to apply this selection to queens, 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 motherqueen regression and intra-class correlation in a population of Apis mellifera mellifera colonies in France; and (2) the regression between daughter-workers to mother-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), suggesting 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 discussed.
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