Uncertainty in the mating strategy of honeybees causes bias and unreliability in the estimates of genetic parameters

Table 2 Errors in the genetic parameter estimates when male mates for controlled mating were correctly modeled in the pedigree

Simulation	Errors in the genetic parameters estimates
Controlled mating strategy	\({\widehat{\upsigma }}_{{\text{W}}}^{2}\)			\({\widehat{\upsigma }}_{{\text{Q}}}^{2}\)			\({\widehat{{\text{r}}}}_{{\text{WQ}}}\)
Controlled mating strategy	Relative bias (%)	Relative SE (%)	% strong deviations	Relative bias (%)	Relative SE (%)	% strong deviations	Bias	SE
SS	− 0.81	18.46	27	− 3.45	17.50	27	0.011	0.152
PS	0.20	20.79	37	− 2.21	19.55	30	0.013	0.165

Controlled mating strategy: SS (single sire) and PS (pseudo-sire) mating
\({\widehat{\upsigma }}_{{\text{W}}}^{2}\), \({\widehat{\upsigma }}_{{\text{Q}}}^{2}\) and \({\widehat{{\text{r}}}}_{{\text{WQ}}}\): estimates of the genetic variances and correlation for worker and queen effect
Strong deviations are those that differ by more than 20% from the true values. The relative bias was calculated as \(\left(\frac{1}{{n}_{rep}}\sum_{1}^{{n}_{rep}}\left(\frac{{\widehat{\upsigma }}_{{\text{A}}}^{2}-{\upsigma }_{{\text{A}}}^{2}}{{\upsigma }_{{\text{A}}}^{2}}\right)\cdot 100\right)\). The relative standard error was the standard deviation across replicates of the relative difference between estimates and the true value

ISSN: 1297-9686