Pete, I agree with you completely--I'm just being a stickler for
semantics. My point was that recombination does not create any novel
alleles for any genes, and thus cannot expand the gene pool diversity-wise.
Re Jerry's comment about variation between colonies headed by sister
queens, this likely has a great deal to do with the diversity of the drone
population. In an inbred commercial stock (which still contains enough
diversity of sex alleles), one can perhaps obtain less variation in
performance between sister hives.
--
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com
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