> >you may be looking at hybrid vigor that will not be present in her
> daughters.


Hybrid vigor is a tricky concept with bees.  Any grafted daughter is most
likely a maternal half sister, and thus would only share 25% kinship with
the parent colony.  The kinship relationship of the colony which she then
founds, as compared to the colony from which she was grafted, will depend
largely upon which drones she mates with.

Apparent hybrid vigor (or its opposite, "crossbreeding depression") may in
actuality be more a function of the dynamics of task specialization of the
various subfamilies of sister cohorts within a colony, rather than true
heterosis, which is an effect of allelic recombination.

I will be discussing this in more detail in an upcoming article.

Randy Oliver

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