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Date: | Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:48:16 -0400 |
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The success here does not necessarily reflect directly on inbreeding as
we know it in the US. There may be many lessons to learn here, and more
research is certainly an exciting prospect, but the number of different
genes and alleles and their heterozygosity may have started way above
what our bottlenecks in the US would produce. A highly diverse,
relatively closed population, that has also adapted over possibly
millenia to local conditions on its native continent, is quite different
than the situation found in most modern isolated populations in the New
World. I'm sure those way more expert than I in genetics could shed more
light.
I would love to see a good honeybee genetics study of the Caribbean
islands, for example, although it would be hard to document all the
introductions over the last hundreds of years. The islands are a
biogeographer's dream laboratory.
I can kick in one bit of data, in about 1958 my father introduced
commercial Italian queens to St. Croix and there has been continuous
management of honeybees there since. At the time he brought the
Italians, no easy feat to our grass airstrip, there was a small, very
dark and quite aggressive wild honeybee on the islands. I took 22
stings to the face once, trying to cut a 'spear' for my sister; the
sapling had comb built into the vines. I woke up hours later to see a
large lump in the slit of vision I had. It took a mirror to figure out
it was my lower lip that was several inches wide. I was about 8, but
none the worse after the ugly phase and still prefer to work bees in
shorts and a t-shirt. I do look carefully before I cut in the woods, tho.
Carolyn in SC, thanks to Hurricane Hugo
On 6/27/2010 9:28 PM, Peter Loring Borst wrote:
> I wish all those folks who go on and on about inbreeding and lack of diversity in US bees would read this:
>
>> In spite of thousands of years confinement of honeybees to the oasis of Kufra,...
Apparently the local colony density is as high
as in non-isolated regions and also heterozygosity
levels are within the range of other honeybee populations (e.g. in Europe)
>
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