"Selective breeding by humans or extreme isolation may produce a particular strain of bee which fits the needs of the beekeeper or the constraints of that extreme environment...."
How can honey bees in the US locally adapt with all the movement of genetics due to the migratory portion of the business? We all know that selective breeding of bees is difficult due to polyandry. One truck of migratory bees could dump enough drones in an area overnight to eliminate years of natural selection towards local adaptation. Then you have the package bee issue. The county I live in in NE Ohio imports something over 100 packages from the south every spring. In general no purchaser really knows where the queens in those packages came from. What we do know is 100 packages into one county is a fair % of the total population of colonies in the county and will dilute any local genetic adaptation fast.
Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner." Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists. "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong." H. L. Mencken
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