Het question

So the person I got my spider and pastel from said they were the result of a bumble bee project that didnt produce bee's. But does that make them het anything? Im not 100% suer how that works. Also What times of year does breeding take place? I've seen pictures from July clutches and pictures from December clutches... This seems pretty broad.


Thanks a lot. Let me know.

Not het for anything...

Breeding is now! :) It is a broad range of time

No Pastel is Co/Dom and spiders are Dominate so no Hets. Only recessives are said to have hets.

As for breeding typical starts in the fall and goes till late summer.

They technically are hets but not the kind you want. Heterozygous just means it only has 1 pair of that allele. A het albino looks normal since Albino is a recessive gene. Recessive genes need 2 recessive alleles to show the albino ism in the phenotype. Pastel is dominant/co-dominant gene, so only 1 allele is needed to produce a visual.

So a pastel is technically a het, but mostly people only use the term het for recessive mutations. A homozygous pastel would be a super pastel, since it has the 2 alleles. A homozygous albino would be a visual albino.

Hope that helps.

Yes, technically spiders are heterozygous for the spider genotype because they have one spider mutant version (aka allele) and one normal for spider version of that gene. So, even though most don't, you could accurately say that you have a het spider.

A bumble bee is a double het spider and pastel. But with pastel being visible in hets you know that you didn't get the pastel gene and your spider is homozygous normal for the pastel genotype.

Remembering what heterozygous means (having an unmatched pair of genes) and which animals are heterozygous makes it easier to predict their offspring. Seeing that a bumble bee is a double het you can see that each offspring has a 50/50 chance of getting the mutant version of each gene for a 25% chance of getting the mutant version of both genes from the bumble bee parent. The 50/50 chance comes from the nature of a het having two different versions in their gene pair and an equal chance as to which version is passed to each offspring.