Extract random effect variances from lme4 mer model object

Question

I have a mer object that has fixed and random effects. How do I extract the variance estimates for the random effects? Here is a simplified version of my question.

Answer 1

Try

attributes(study)

As an example:

> women
   height weight
1      58    115
2      59    117
3      60    120
4      61    123
5      62    126
6      63    129
7      64    132
8      65    135
9      66    139
10     67    142
11     68    146
12     69    150
13     70    154
14     71    159
15     72    164

> lm1 <- lm(height ~ weight, data=women)
> attributes(lm1)
$names
 [1] "coefficients"  "residuals"     "effects"       "rank"         
 [5] "fitted.values" "assign"        "qr"            "df.residual"  
 [9] "xlevels"       "call"          "terms"         "model"        

$class
[1] "lm"

> lm1$coefficients
(Intercept)      weight 
 25.7234557   0.2872492 

> lm1$coefficients[[1]]

[1] 25.72346


> lm1$coefficients[[2]]

[1] 0.2872492

The end.