Peter wrote

> Mendel had always wanted to transfer his experiments from plants to 
> animals and began crossbreeding bees around 1871. He successfully produced 
> a hybrid strain of bees by crossing bees from Egypt and South
America that produced excellent honey. However, they were so vicious that 
they stung everybody around for miles and had to be destroyed. Mendel had 
little success studying hereditary elements in bees, in part because their 
reproduction was so hard to control.

Interesting article.  Wonder what the source of the South American bees was? 
As I understand it there were no Apis mellifera native to South America so 
would have been brought over from somewhere else.

We had an unsuccessful introduction of bees from Rio de Janerio in 1810 
which were most likely ones that had been brought from Europe to Rio.  I see 
Mendel's work was in 1871 so there was plenty of time to bring further bees 
from Europe to South America.

Trevor Weatherhead
AUSTRALIA

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