Hi Everyone,

 peterborst wrote in part:

"Now I confess to being thoroughly confused. Didn't Warwick Kerr cross European bees and African bees, and didn't the progeny populate most of South and Central America? Or are you talking about the Cape Bees only? I can see that they might be a separate species, with strange habits unfamiliar to all other strains of Apis mellifera. But I  am no taxonomist (wouldn't want to be)."

One of the interesting things about the spread of the africanized honey bees in the new world has been their seeming to displace other honey bees throughout the tropical areas.  The researchers continue to tell us that the bees even in the southern US are african with very little european genes mixed into the population except at the northern edge where hybridization is much more common.  It appears that they have displaced european honey bees instead of mixing with them.  Now this could be due to either total saturation by african drones due to very high feral populations or to some mechanism or mechanisms that prevent interbreeding at the population level.  Maybe both are going on.  I figured a few years back it was mainly due to the high feral populations the africans have and the resulting drone saturation.  In light of more recent research that suggests that the populations may not interbreed successfully in the long term i.e. the hybrids tend to die out fairly quickly as well as evidence of selective mating it is starting to look like there are mechanisms of reproductive isolation at the population level.  Dr Hoffmann also presented research on volatile pheromones that shows differences between the african and european bees that might help explain why it is so very difficult to requeen african colonies with european queens.  This also suggests the bees might be different species.  One also wonders about the cape problem in SA because the pheromones of scuts don't seem to control capensis workers which leads to the breakdown of the colony.  That this also appears to be happening in AZ.  Again raising the possibilty that we are actually looking at different species of honey bees rather than different races of the same species.
I suggest we need to unravel this to better understand what is going on and figure out how to manage the impacts on beekeeping in the rest of North America.

Guess we do need more research on those africanized bees.

FWIW

blane




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Blane White
MN Dept of Agriculture
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