Joe writes:
Any survey comparing EHB populations to AHB populations
which is restricted to smaller voids such as water meter
boxes will naturally show a prominence of AHB genetics,
because EHB are less likely to be found in these voids,
having greater preference towards larger voids.
Look, I am sorry I cannot share these papers with everyone. I am constrained to excerpting copyrighted material. It is quite clear from reading the decades of work, that nobody is making the assumption that you described. The population is thoroughly Africanized, of that there can be no doubt.
The fact that 8000 of these swarms have been removed and they are all African does not indicate a subset that prefers meter boxes. As I said, they occupy a variety of cavities. The reason this study used meter box bees was that they are regularly discovered and the meters are uniformly distributed throughout the metro area.
Therefore, any particular clustering would not be related to the availability of nest sites, but to other factors such as water or whatever. That is what the aim of the study was, not to see if they were African or not. In the first couple of paragraphs this is made clear:
Africanized honey bees were first recorded in
Arizona in 1993 (Guzman-Novoa and Page, 1994; Loper, 1997), and
the greater Tucson metropolitan area supports an abundant population
(Baum et al., 2008). In areas with Africanized honey bees,
the feral population is primarily Africanized (Harrison et al., 2006;
Pinto et al., 2004, 2005; Rabe et al., 2005; Schneider et al., 2004).
We used a dataset of Africanized honey bee colony occupancy
of water meter boxes to evaluate the influence of spatial variables
on the distribution of Africanized honey bee colonies in the greater
Tucson metropolitan area.
K.A. Baum et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning 100 (2011) 153–162
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