> I recall reading a recent study that found one nuclear allele that was associated with upregulated defensiveness--that gene might be used for a practical test.

comment:
I think it's safe to say that it is unlikely that a complex behavioral trait would depend on one particular allele. It's more plausible that defensiveness is co-regulated by multiple genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors. 

Quoting Brock Harpur:

Hunt’s foundational work demonstrated that components of the honey bee’s defense response and the production alarm pheromone are all highly heritable and influenced by at least 15 broad Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs). Those initial studies, and more recent crosses also revealed parent-of-origin effects for defense response: more defensive colonies originated from European-derived queens mated to African drones than the inverse cross, and potential epistasis acting among QTLs. The parent-of-origin effects are likely the result of differentially-expressed gene clusters within two of the major-effect QTL regions known as sting-1 on chromosome 3 and sting-2 on chromosome 12. Finally, gene expression studies using similar comparisons have revealed that core metabolic genes are associated with defense response. 

I was able to scan the genomes of more- and less-defensive colonies and identify regions that had large differences in allele frequency between the two groups. Our genomic contrasts allowed us to identify 63 loci within the bee genome with substantial levels of genetic differentiation between the most defensive and least defensive AHB colonies. ... there may be distinctly different ancestral alleles acting on different aspects of defense response within AHB.

© Brock A. Harpur, 2017

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