>The whole thing boils down to this: there are highly selected honey bee lines and there are run of the mill honey bees. I think the locally adapted bees (at least in the US) are mythological.

After three weeks of informed debate, we're back where we started...

It is certainly possible that local adaptation in honey bees in the US is a mirage - but based on the information presented thus far, it is difficult in my humble opinion to draw this conclusion based on what is known to-date.

Though I am not aware of the question of local adaptation being studied here in the 'Lower 48', our friends to the North have looked into it for us and found quite a lot of distinctives based on the geographic origin of stocks:

Ecological Adaptation of Diverse Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Populations:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011096


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