Suppose I had a clonal human cell line.  Suppose I took the mitochondria
out of some of those cells and put in a chimp mitochondria.  Does that make
my new clonal cell line now chimp?   Or is it still a human cell line that
just happens to have chimp mitochondria?  If you consider it a chimp cell
line the answer to the wild type honey bee question might be yes, but only
if that cell line would produce an animal that looked and behaved like a
chimp if the clonal line were turned into a individual.  If you consider
the cell line to still be human, or if turning the cell line into an
individual produces an animal that looks and acts like a human, the same
question is answered no.

Clearly the cell line still has all the stuff that makes humans and lacks
all kinds of stuff that would make it chimp.

Regardless you still need to always remember that wild type is an arbitrary
choice.  For example wild type in corn is generally considered yellow dent
field corn simply because back when wild type was picked we did not know
what corn's ancestors were.  In fact even today we only know
approximately.  There are lots of teosinte subspecies and probably many
went into the development of corn.  About the most you can say is wild type
in general is all about defining a phenotype as a standard so you can pick
anything as wild type that you wish as long as it has a well defined
phenotype.  In the vast majority of cases phenotype is established only by
nuclear genes and all mitochondria do is to provide energy to allow the
rest of the cellular processes to function.

Dick

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