Qualidade de rainhas Apis mellifera africanizadas (Hymenoptera: Apidae): delineamento do perfil comercial

Abstract

The national beekeeping sector has been developing and reaching the international market over the last few years; however, the sector is still poorly structured compared to other countries. The production and commercialization of queens is an emerging branch in national beekeeping and has been developing in recent times, aiming to meet the demand for the replacement of queens since their periodic exchange leads to gains in productivity and survival of the colony. However, the little knowledge available in the literature about the production potential of the Africanized Apis mellifera of national occurrence hinders the growth of the sector. Thus, this research aimed to evaluate the quality of commercial queen bees and identify characteristics with the potential to be used as a qualitative parameter of queens. For the research, 200 queens were used, 100 virgins and 100 fertilized, produced by two different breeders. Analyzes were performed based on three independent variables: shipment (3), family (9), and reproductive status (2), and dependent variables: morphometric measurements (7) and reproductive characteristics (6). Thus, it was possible to observe that shipment II showed a difference in five of the seven morphometric characteristics in relation to shipment I and only three reproductive characteristics showed a difference, where shipment III was different from shipment I in all of them. The same pattern of differentiation was observed for the reproductive characteristics of the family variable, where family 9 presented very different values from family 1. For reproductive status, the fertilized queens presented higher values than the virgins for all the characteristics that showed a difference. In Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the first two CPs were able to explain 41.5% and 40.6% of the variation presented for virgin and fertilized queens, respectively. For virgin queens, the morphometric traits contributed more homogeneously to the formation of the first CP, whereas for fertilized queens, the weight and weight of the ovaries had a greater contribution. Thus, only for reproductive status was it possible to clearly differentiate the groups from the dispersion analysis. Regarding the mortality rate, remittance I and families 1 and 5 had the lowest probabilities. As for sperm viability, shipment I and families 1 and 2 showed greater viability. A greater variation between the traits was verified for the variables shipping and reproductive status (6), and for the latter, the number of ovarioles showed a difference between virgin and fertilized queens. In the correlation analysis, only the traits' total length and width of the abdomen correlated with reproductive traits for the two reproductive statuses, which can be listed as a selection parameter for the quality of queens because they are easy to measure. The production of queens is still carried out on a small scale; however, from the evaluation of this material available on the market, produced by two different breeders, it was possible to observe that they have traits that indicate quality that can be used in future improvement programs.