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There are plenty of examples of black bees living in extremely hot areas.
According to Eva Crane:
The honeybees in Madagascar, off the east coast of Southern Africa,
are considered to be indigenous; they are uniformly black.
A. m. intermissa is native to most of the coast of Africa from the
Libyan desert to the Atlantic coast. It is a black bee which is easily
alerted to sting. It seems to be the only race that can live in the
climatic extremes of this region. The bees are unsuited to temperate
regions and those imported to Europe do not survive.
South of the Pyrenees is the Iberian bee, from which Apis mellifera
mellifera may be derived.
* This last statement points to the possibility that all the black
bees of Europe have ancestry in Africa, where the black color may have
originated.
The isolated bees of Madagascar and the mountains of Tanazania and
Kenya could be remnants of an original black race, which was
supplanted by scutellata and lines related to it (adansonii,
lamarckii, litorea, and jemenitica).
According to Ruttner, black Apis mellifera monticola has
characteristics of both the African and the Mellifera branch, further
supporting the idea that they could be a very ancient black bee.
--
Peter L. Borst
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