Hi all
A few years ago, work was done near me to determine the genetic structure of a survivor population of wild colonies of European. The bees in the apiaries belong to a friend of mine, and also, I worked for the queen breeder he purchase his queens from. Also, the study was conducted by Tom Seeley, Dave Tarpy and Debbie Delaney, all of whom I know and respect.
The study looked at feral colonies as well as nearby commercial colonies in the apiaries. The colonies had been requeened over the years using "Golden Italians" per the breeder's description. So imagine my surprise when the genetic testing showed:
> Sequencing of the COI-COII intergenic re- gion revealed just two haplotypes in the three groups of colonies: C1 and C2, which are common in two subspecies of the honeybee native to Europe, Apis mellifera ligustica and Apis mellifera carnica , respectively. The 8 colonies in the Arnot Forest that yielded a clear result exhibited an even distribution of the C1 (ligustica ) and C2 (carnica ) haplotypes (50 % C1 and 50 % C2); however, the 10 colonies in both apiary 1 and apiary 2 exhibited mainly the C2 (carnica ) haplotype (90 and 80 % C2, respectively).
The feral bees were a mixture of italian and carniolan at about 50/50 and the apiary bees were mostly carniolan, despite being purchased from a vendor of "Golden Italians." The only logical explanation is that the two lines have been blended over the century or more that they have been bred in this country, and separated out by color.
I wrote about it when the paper first came out in 2015. I quoted C. C. Stone, Clarksville, Texas:
> We know that color and temper are separately inheritable, also size and color, and a little is known concerning a few other characters, but very little about any. Our great need just now is for some information that we can get from nobody but the geneticist.
At the time (2015) Randy wrote:
> Everything about the honey bee reproductive strategy runs counter to selective breeding by man. Hence the difficulty of any long-term success in breeding programs, unless one can control the entire drone pool to which a population is exposed.
Again, quoting Delaney:
> Due to the open aerial mating behavior of honey bees, the queens produced are some admixture of the different gene pools that are present at these central California sites.
Now, we have the work of the geneticists. What they are saying is pretty clear, the US bees are an amalgamation, and the various strains being sold have been selected from this mixed gene pool, based primarily on criteria such as color, temperament, and rapid buildup.
PLB
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