Apologies for the slow reply Pete.  This thread has strayed from local
adaptation to a reflogging of the TF horse.  Allow me to return to the
subject of local adaptation.


> >African bees seem to be orders of magnitude more defensive than any sort
> of European bees.
>

I can't speak from personal experience of African bees, but this is
certainly not the case with the Africanized bees in South America or the
southern states.  The bell curves of defensiveness overlap greatly--they
are certainly not orders of magnitude apart.

>
> >As a bee inspector, I encountered a very hostile colony of black honey
> bees, quite possibly descended from Apis m. m., by all appearances. They
> were runny, unfazed by smoke, etc. but as I beat a retreat they stopped
> following at about 10 feet (3 meters). On the other hand, another colony I
> encountered exhibited all the characteristics of African bees, followed for
> 1000 feet and never relented (until I euthanized them). So this is a big
> difference.
>

Some of us have more experience with the dark ferals, prior to the invasion
of the Africans.  Some of them would attack with minimal provocation simply
by getting out of a vehicle a hundred feet from an apiary.  On the other
hand, the majority of SoCal Africanized ferals do not exhibit this
behavior.

>
> >Further, much of beekeeping over the centuries was not selective at all,
> people just collected colonies and robbed from them regardless of the
> nature of the bees.


Actually, there is clear evidence that selective breeding and importation
of gentle bee stocks was practiced in the Middle East over 3000 years ago.
I'm not clear as to how much was practiced in Europe.

> they evolved to be less defensive because they lived in protected spaces
which required less defense

Apis mellifera scutellata is a cavity nester, the same as the European
races.

>
> >A European colony could go for years without being noticed, high up in a
> hollow tree with a small hole for an entrance.


Keep in mind that most of the forests in much of Europe were chopped down
in Roman times, perhaps leaving few nesting sites for honey bees, other
than those provided by humans.  Human nature being what it is, beekeepers
may have, as you say, euthanized the most defensive colonies.

> The flip side is: if the population is too small, and there is a strong
force of dilution, the beneficial allele can't get a foothold to become
predominant. This is why local adaptation in honey bees is probably a
mirage.

The above statement can be easily disproven.  Most any bee breeder--who
applies selective pressure to a small population--can tell you how easy it
is to shift the genetics of that population.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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