R help - Apr 2011 - extract variance for random effects from "mer" object

I get an output from a glmer package, but would like to extract the variance of
the Random effects, in this case called trtpair and the value is 0.

Can I extract it directly or do I need to do some further calculations on the
"mer" object to get it?

Thanks

Jim
> class(fednmaout)
[1] "mer"
attr(,"package")
[1] "lme4"
> fednmaout
Generalized linear mixed model fit by the Laplace approximation 
Formula: cbind(fednmadat$events, fednmadat$patnums - fednmadat$events) ~     
treat + tn + (1 | trtpair)
   AIC   BIC logLik deviance
 84.01 153.1 -9.006    18.01
Random effects:
 Groups  Name        Variance Std.Dev.
 trtpair (Intercept)  0        0      
Number of obs: 60, groups: trtpair, 3

==============================Dr. Jim Maas
University of East Anglia

Maas James Dr (MED <J.Maas <at> uea.ac.uk> writes:
> I get an output from a glmer package, but would like 
> to extract the variance of the Random effects, in this
> case called trtpair and the value is 0.
[snip]
> > fednmaout
> Generalized linear mixed model fit by the Laplace approximation 
> Formula: cbind(fednmadat$events, fednmadat$patnums - fednmadat$events) ~
treat + tn + (1 | trtpair) 
>    AIC   BIC logLik deviance
>  84.01 153.1 -9.006    18.01
> Random effects:
>  Groups  Name        Variance Std.Dev.
>  trtpair (Intercept)  0        0      
> Number of obs: 60, groups: trtpair, 3
> 
  VarCorr(fednmaout)[[1]]

(the [[1]] means to extract the variance for the
first (and only in this case) random effect.)