> so someone needs to deliver the bad news about color alone being a less-than reliable indicator of much of anything important.
> This definitely takes the conversation backward a hundred years.
But even over a hundred ago, some beekeepers already knew that color is not a reliable diagnostic of ancestry. Yet the bad news about color apparently needs retelling because the misconception is still widely repeated.
This is from Science in 1915
>Pure Italian queens mated to Carniolan drones produce workers and queens which are indistinguishable, so far as color is concerned, from the parent Italian stock: that is, in the F1 generation of the "primary," cross, the yellow color is completely dominant. In the reciprocal cross, in which Carniolan queens are mated to Italian drones, the yellow color is also dominant, but not as completely so as in the primary cross : the F1 queens and workers show nearly, but not quite, as much yellow color as the parent Italian stock. The significance of this in practical bee breeding is at once apparent. For years professional queen-breeders have assumed that if an Italian queen throws workers which show the typical Italian coloring, it is prima facie evidence that she has been purely mated. From the above results, it is evident that such is not necessarily the case, for such a queen might have mated to either an Italian or Carniolan drone (or even, presumably, to a black drone), and in either case, her workers would have the typical Italian color. The purity of an Italian queen's mating, therefore can not be determined by an examination of her workers. Further reference to this is made below. The production of yellow workers by a pure Carniolan queen, on the other hand, immediately stamps her as having been impurely mated.
INHERITANCE IN THE HONEY BEE.
W. Newell
Published 5 February 1915 Biology, Medicine Science
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