> African bees seem to be orders of magnitude more defensive than any sort of European bees.
> Doesn't seem to be true of all scutellata

Right. I played fast and loose with the term "African bees." They used to be called "Africanized bees" but that term is technically sort of silly. In any case, there's this:

More aggressive colonies are obtained from crosses of European-derived queens mated to
African drones than the inverse cross. This effect is likely driven by imprinting at least two gene
clusters, one on chromosome 3 and the other on chromosome 12.

We found non-random patterns of admixture at several defence associated loci,
suggesting that a combination of African and West-European alleles play a role in defensive
behaviour in AHBs. This may seem at odds with common wisdom that AHBs are defensive
strictly because of A. m. scutellata alleles. However, our finding that defence response is
underpinned by a mosaic pattern of ancestry fits well with the current understanding of both
introgression and the genetics of defence response (aggression) in other species

When an admixed European queen (C- and M-lineage) is crossed with
an Africanized drone, the genes expressed in this cluster have the European queen’s genotype
(Gibson et al. 2015) and the colonies are significantly more defensive than the inverse cross
(Breed et al. 2004, Gibson et al. 2015). We found that the most defensive AHB colonies had
significantly more M-lineage ancestry at this gene cluster than less-defensive colonies.

Population genomic approaches to understanding the genetics and evolution of social insects
Brock A. Harpur Thesis. 2017

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