I wrote

> Anyway,  they came back “European.” The tests they use do not reliably discern hybrids.  



Response

> What sort of European?  Apis Mellifera mellifera (the black bees of N.  

> Europe; AM Ligustica (Italians) AM Carnica (Carniolans) etc etc; about a dozen  

> different strains.  With a reasonable degree of accuracy they can be  

> distinguished morphologically



Perhaps you have not followed the discussion closely. We are dealing with hybrids between Africanized bees and the mixed genotype bees of the USA. What I am saying is that these hybrids cannot be classified on the basis of external characters. 



It’s like your typical mongrel dog. These cannot be assigned to any particular breed. One can perhaps identify the parents of origin, but what good is this? If it doesn’t look like a collie, then it isn’t one. 



Meanwhile, there appears to be no genetic marker for vicious behavior observed in some hybrid colonies (nor with dogs, for that matter). If the behavior is the issue, then the genes are irrelevant. If the genetic background of the bees are to be used for regulatory purposes, you have to go deep into the genome, as was reported by Oldroyd et al.



> This study shows that a panel of 95 single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs], chosen to differentiate between the African, Eastern European and Western European lineages, can detect Africanized honeybees with a high degree of confidence via ancestry assignment.



What this means is that certain areas of the genome have to be sequenced (expensive) and then compared to baseline references for SNPs. 



> A SNP is a change in one letter of the DNA code that occurs in less than 1 percent of the bees examined. (W. S. Sheppard)



I don’t have the funds for this, nor is the service is not being offered to regulators. They authors state:



> We hope our panel will provide a new, reliable diagnostic for border control that will enable countries to screen imported bees for Africanization.



But we aren’t there yet.



PLB







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