Because spider and pastel are apparently mutations of completely separate genes you can figure the results for each gene separately and then overlay them.

Just looking at the pastel locus you get 25% chance super pastel, 50% (1/2) chance pastel, and 25% (1/4) chance normal for pastel.

Unfortunately 20 years in we still don't know if spider is dominant or co-dominant. My GUESS is that it's co-dominant homozygous lethal and that the 25% of potential homozygous spider eggs aren't laid or don't hatch. Could totally be wrong on that but that's my guess. If spider is homozygous lethal it just means that you only get a 3/4 size clutch from spider X spider but the babies you do get should all be fine (assuming the homozygous spiders don't hatch unlike the homozygous lethal HG woma where the pearls hatch but then don't live). So going with this guess (anything with spider is a guess still, including the widely accepted guess that it's dominant) you would get 3/4 sized clutch with 66% (2/3) spiders and 33% (1/3) chance normal for spider.

So overlaying the two results you come up with a 3/4 sized clutch with:

1/4 X 1/3 = 1/12 normals
1/2 X 1/3 = 1/6 = 2/12 pastel
1/4 X 1/3 = 1/12 super pastel
1/4 X 2/3 = 2/12 spider
1/2 X 2/3 = 2/6 = 4/12 bee
1/4 X 2/3 = 2/12 killer bee

So, one out of 12 normals sounds pretty good to me. Each egg is twice as likely to be a killer bee as a normal and 4 times as likely to be a bee.

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• bee X bee ?'s - coreygreene, Sun Mar 20 16:42:52 2011
• RE: bee X bee ?'s - RandyRemington, Wed Apr 6 23:39:26 2011