ABSTRACT
The situation in South America was favorable for genetic investigations of defensive behavior. Appropriate genetic dissection of defensive behavior should include measurement of many of these aspects of the behavioral sequence. Morphological and physiological assays would be less subject to environmental conditions than behavioral ones, but may be difficult to define, to perform, and to correlate with the end result of a defensive sequence. With the development of appropriate measuring systems, defensive behavior of populations of bees can be accurately described and differences can be related to the underlying genetic structures of the population. Because defensive behavior is complex and difficult to dissect into basic units reflecting the influence of one major gene, a more viable approach to genetic analysis of the character is quantitative genetics. This approach is directed to populations, not individuals, and to characters that are controlled by many genes that interact in both additive and nonadditive ways.
