Breeding Value
Lexikon
The breeding value estimates what hereditary share a queen has in the performance of her colony.
The breeding value estimates what hereditary share a queen has in the performance of her colony. It thus separates, as far as possible, the genetics from location, weather and management. It is calculated for the German-speaking breeding associations at the State Institute for Apiculture in Hohen Neuendorf and published via the BeeBreed database.
The scale is set up so that the average of the comparison group is always exactly 100 and the standard deviation is 10. A value of 110 therefore means that the queen is better than about 84 percent of her comparison group, a value of 120 better than about 98 percent. Values below 100 lie below average.
Breeding values are estimated for honey yield, gentleness, steadiness on the comb and swarming inertness, which together form the performance index, as well as for traits of varroa tolerance. From the individual values an overall breeding value is formed, whose weighting the breeder can set, and which is then again referenced to the mean value of 100.
A particular feature of bee breeding is that the performance of a colony is delivered by thousands of workers that do not reproduce and whose fathers are not individually known. The estimate therefore takes into account both the influence of the queen and that of the workers. One guiding principle of breeding value estimation is: more important than high breeding values are realistic breeding values, and those only come from cleanly recorded performance tests.