Ueen top quality, beneath the assumption that a bigger spermatheca could hold a larger volume of semen [35]. Its size is usually measured with or without having the tracheal nets, and its diameter need to be bigger than 1.two mm for high-quality queens [25,37]. This measurement was applied as a direct estimation from the volume and as an indirect estimation from the theoretical maximum quantity of spermatozoa stored in spermatheca [26,28,34,37]. The size of the spermatheca is influenced by rearing conditions and genetics, and it’s inversely proportional towards the larval age at which the queen was reared from [26,43]. Queens raised from newly hatched larvae showed bigger spermatheca [42,43,45]. On the other hand, the spermatheca is seldom filled completely, as the semen’s occupied volume in experimental queens was reported to be on typical 47 [26,34]. From a hypothetical viewpoint, a “high quality” queen need to hence be morphologically defects-free, and it must possess a significant physique, spermatheca, and ovaries in order toAnimals 2021, 11,3 ofstore a higher number of spermatozoa and lay a copious number of eggs, preferably more than 2000 eggs every day [14,46]. In this study, each ARN-6039 site external and internal physical queen traits were investigated. Such traits incorporate: body weight, weight and width in the tagmata (head, thorax, and abdomen), length of your proper forewing, diameter and volume with the spermatheca, quantity of sperms inside the spermatheca, and quantity of ovarioles. Ovarioles were counted as an alternative to weighed because the ovary’s weight could be influenced by the developmental stages of your eggs they contain, as pointed out by Amiri et al. [35]. The aim of this analysis was to investigate phenotypic and genetic variability with the above-mentioned traits for queen high-quality within a small population bred by an expert queen breeder in Northern Italy. two. Materials and Methods The queens have been offered by an Italian queen-breeding and beekeeping business that produces and sells about 40000 queens per week, from spring to late summer time. The rearing from the queens was characterized by a CJ033466 site standardized production technique and by traceability of each maternal and paternal lines of each and every queen (the pedigree). The standardized rearing program consists of working with only queen-less finisher colonies. These colonies are fed and treated inside a standardized strategy to present uniform quality. Particularly, these colonies get new brood from one particular single apiary frequently. The “brood-donor” apiary is composed of genetically uniform colonies. The grafts are inserted inside the finisher colonies to get a week. Afterwards, the royal cells are collected and incubated at 34.5 C for 11 days. Soon after incubation, the cells are brought to the mating station where they may be inserted within the mating nuclei. This course of action was carried out by the exact same operators following a strict timetable along the season, which minimizes any possible error variance as a consequence of management practices. This study was conducted on 147 queens bred for the duration of spring/summer seasons of 2017 (n = 70) and 2018 (n = 77). The analyzed queens have been bred at diverse occasions of the production season reported as the ordinal quantity of the week of your year in which the mated queen was harvested from the mating nucleus. All queens naturally mated inside the identical location within the year. The queens have been bred in groups of sisters from ten maternal lines in 2017, and 7 maternal lines in 2018. In addition, the maternal lines shared popular ancestors. The maternal lines queens mated at an isolated mating.