The success here does not necessarily reflect directly on inbreeding as 
we know it in the US.  There may be many lessons to learn here, and more 
research is certainly an exciting prospect, but the number of different 
genes and alleles and their heterozygosity may have started way above 
what our bottlenecks in the US would produce.  A highly diverse, 
relatively closed population, that has also adapted over possibly 
millenia to local conditions on its native continent, is quite different 
than the situation found in most modern isolated populations in the New 
World. I'm sure those way more expert than I in genetics could shed more 
light.

I would love to see a good honeybee genetics study of the Caribbean 
islands, for example, although it would be hard to document all the 
introductions over the last hundreds of years. The islands are a 
biogeographer's dream laboratory.

I can kick in one bit of data, in about 1958 my father introduced 
commercial Italian queens to St. Croix and there has been continuous 
management of honeybees there since.   At the time he brought the 
Italians, no easy feat to our grass airstrip,  there was a small, very 
dark and quite aggressive wild honeybee on the islands.  I took 22 
stings to the face once, trying to cut a 'spear' for my sister; the 
sapling had comb built into the vines.  I woke up hours later to see a 
large lump in the slit of vision I had.  It took a mirror to figure out 
it was my lower lip that was several inches wide. I was about 8, but 
none the worse after the ugly phase and still prefer to work bees in 
shorts and a t-shirt.  I do look carefully before I cut in the woods, tho.

Carolyn in SC, thanks to Hurricane Hugo

On 6/27/2010 9:28 PM, Peter Loring Borst wrote:
> I wish all those folks who go on and on about inbreeding and lack of diversity in US bees would read this:
>
>> In spite of thousands of years confinement of honeybees to the oasis of Kufra,...

  Apparently the local colony density is as high

as in non-isolated regions and also heterozygosity

levels are within the range of other honeybee populations (e.g. in Europe)
>

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