David:

  Great questions - and you've come to the right place for an informed discussion on this topic.

With the caveat that I am no expert, I'll throw in my two cents and also invite the hive mind to offer their thoughts as well.

In summary, I suspect the answer is similar to most things in beekeeping - 'it depends'.

>1. My original theoretical one: if you have 5 beekeepers in a 2-3 mile radius and we all get our packages from Georgia, how long before you have a “local queen?”  I mean if the queen is from Georgia and the drone eggs she lays are from Georgia drones…and even if someone swarms and they mate with other Georgia drones from the other local beehives - when will you get an “Illinois queen?”

Part of the challenge is we have to first define what we mean by 'local queen'. I suspect when most of us use this term, we generally mean a colony or population that has performance and survival characteristics that are well-aligned to our area. In other words, we are judging based largely on phenotype and not necessarily genotype. And phenotype appears to be driven by multiple genetic, epigenetic (and possibly behavioral) characteristics that might line-up in as little as a couple of generations. An interesting series of studies along this theme is 'Fourth Generation of Closed-Population Honeybee Breeding' by Szabo et al. The punchline - in four years, they found that bees from similar genetic origins bred in four isolated areas and two environments (North versus South) in Alberta differed in 8 morphological and 14 colony-level traits. So I suspect that phenotypical adaptation likely occurs fairly quickly in many environments.

>2. It could very well be that even “Georgia Queens” have some mixed up DNA in them.  So this question is how could, say, a Georgia queen have non Georgia DNA?  I have to assume it was from a breeder queen from out of state or whatever local drones the virgin queens are mating with in the Georgia mating yards of that package producer…?.

The genetic question is certainly a tougher nut to crack - and while there is a whole lot we don't know, I think it is safe to say that in all studied populations the predominant direction of gene flow is generally in the direction of alleles that confer benefit in a particular environment to maladapted genetics. So to the extent that a 'locally adapted' population exists, they are providing more benefit to the overall population than the imported population is 'watering down' the beneficial alleles. Staying in Canada, a good study that explored beneficial gene expression is 'Ecological Adaptation of Diverse Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Populations' by Parker et al.

Specific to your question - the net impact of recombination and the availability of drones that confer beneficial genetics ultimately helps hasten local adaptation at the genetic level, particularly when beekeepers are often (but not always) minimizing the drone population in their managed colonies.

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