As usual, the news report is a shallow reflection of the actual work. Here are some excerpts which show that there is a lot more to the story:



We predicted that we would find morphological changes over time. Indeed, there has been an overall reduction in body size. Likewise, canonical variate analysis of bee-wing landmarks found a significant difference in the mean wing shape between old and modern populations.

These morphological changes are consistent with changes in the underlying developmental programme, though they may also result from stress produced by mite infestation, or other environmental effects. African honey bees, which show resistance to V. destructor, are smaller than European honey bees. So the changes in size found here, if adaptive, resulted either from convergent adaptation or perhaps gene flow from honey bees of African descent.

We cannot strictly rule out the extinction of the Ithaca population followed by re-colonization from more closely related populations including domestic populations as one would have to sample bees from the 1990s when the hypothetical extinction would have taken place. 

The presence of a small number of African genes in New York State most likely results from queen bees being shipped from the southern to the northern states.

A recent microsatellite study of wild and managed honey bee colonies living near Ithaca, NY found strong genetic differences between them, suggesting that the wild population is not merely a sink for escaped domestic colonies28. However, there is evidence of gene flow from commercial populations, such as the increase in mitochondrial genotypes commonly used in beekeeping, and the introgression of African genes.

Mikheyev, A. S., Tin, M. M., Arora, J., & Seeley, T. D. (2015). Museum samples reveal rapid evolution by wild honey bees exposed to a novel parasite. Nature Communications, 6.

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