Estimating heritability in honeybees: Comparison of three major methods based on empirical and simulated datasets

Abstract

Phenotypic change in response to selection directly depends on the amount of phenotypic variation and whether this variation is transmitted from parents to offspring. Hence, predicting the evolutionary potential of a trait can be done by estimating the genetic component of the phenotypic variance V P (namely the heritability) which is calculated from the phenotypic resemblance of related individuals in quantitative genetic analyses (Lynch & Walsh, 1998). More precisely, the genetic variance (V G ) can be partitioned into an additive component (V A ) as well as non-additive components: the dominance variance (V D , due to the interaction of alleles at the same locus) and