Honey bee colony defense consist of two distinct behaviors, guarding and stinging. Previous studies established that guard bees are a genetically non-random sample of the bees in the colony, showing that the genotype of the workers influences the probability that a bee behaves as a guard in the colony. QTLs that affect defensive behavior have been mapped as a colony trait in a population derived from Africanized and European honey bees. The objective of this study is to detect and locate QTLs that influence the expression of guarding behavior on individual honey bees of European race. Two colonies were used for this study, one classified as high defensive and one as low defensive. A queen was reared from the high defensive colony and was artificially inseminated with the semen of one haploid drone from the low defensive colony in order to produce a hybrid colony. From this hybrid colony, hybrid queens were reared and seven of them were single-drone artificially inseminated with the semen of haploid drones from the high defensive colony and three were inseminated with the semen of haploid drones of the low defensive colony in order to produce colonies composed of backcross workers. Bees performing guarding behavior were collected from the entrance of each hive. A random sample of bees from the inside of the colony and a sample of foragers were taken from each colony as a control. The genome of the sampled bees was screened using AFLPs markers and STS markers linked to the putative defensive behavior QTLs previously mapped. Two genetic maps were constructed from the population, one for each type of backcross. A binary quantitative trait analysis was performed to detect and locate possible binary QTLs that influenced the expression of guarding behavior.
Species 1: Hymenoptera Apidae Apis mellifera
Keywords: Honeybee, QTL mapping
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