http://www.beesource.com/pov/lusby/bsmay1991.htm

...now, before we all go calling these bees "africanized", lets look at the timeframe....this was written 2 years before ahb were found in arizona (where there was a bee lab looking for such)...and these bees were being worked with by erickson and others at the tucson bee lab.  if these "lus bees" were really "ahb", it would say a lot about the observational abilities of these researchers.

seems to me that thelytoky is a useful survival mechanism, and not a genetic dead end.  if a queen never returns from her mating flights (and there are no young brood, eggs, or already started queens) , the conventional wisdom is that laying workers will produce drones until the hive explodes with worker layed drones (in a last ditch attempt to spread the genetics of the previous queen) and dies off.  why would one of these worker layed eggs developing into a queen via thelytoky be more of a dead end than this explosion of workers?  queens can get picked off by a bird in flight, and this is not necessarily a sign of weak genetics.

beekeepers who never let things get to this point (colonies with laying workers in a queenless situation left to their own devices to the end) will be diluting any genetics that produce thelytoky...these traits will never be selected for in such situations.  i expect queen breeders are careful not to let this kind of situation develop...which will lead to "breeding against" this trait.  any thoughts?

deknow

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