Hi John!
Welcome back! I bet you could tell us a whole lot about "morphometrics", having measure bees all over Arizona. Instead, I have had to hit the books, but it has been interesting!

quote:
>CLONING (THELYTOKY): Is the holding constant of race/strain genetics from one generation to the next naturally or by artificially increasing the propensity of worker bees to lay viable brood, to raise queens as an alternate survival system to supplement normal queen mating in case the virgin queen is lost during the mating flight.

Why this emphasis on cloning? The idea appears to be to maintain a unique stock of bees by avoiding the normal crossing with drones. This is not really possible, since while it is possible to raise a viable queen from an unfertilized egg -- for that queen to lay normally, she must be mated with multiple drones. And it is probably not even a good idea. Too closed a population leads to inbreeding, which leads to eggs that won't hatch --  witness the poor brood patterns that are seen in heavily inbred lines. Furthermore, thelytoky is most likely a vestigial anomaly (it occurs rarely in bees and ants) and an evolutionary reversal, leading backwards to non-social bees.

"Good examples of the initial step in reverse social evolution, facultative worker thelytoky in the absence of the queen, include the Cape honey bee" from "Safer Without Sex, Thelytokous Parthenogenesis and Regulation of Reproduction in the Ant" by Klaus Shilder

quote:
>Permanent results can only be achieved by the use of naturally occurring races/strains of honeybees. Since a bee by any other name is still a bee, then beekeepers must use individual or combinations of large or small caste races/strains of hot (yellow) or cold-weather (brown/black) bees to accomplish this.

The use of color as an identifying characteristic of honeybee "races" is a gross oversimplification. Ruttner, in 1988, described the range of colors which exists on a north to south continuum as well as high and low altitudes. (Yellow bees in the tropics and low altitudes , black bees in the temperate zones and mountains). However, he notes that there are too many exceptions to this even to be able to *generalize*.

There are black races in the tropics and yellow in the north. Furthermore, instead of being an indicator of racial (morphometric) type, dark and light colorations may in fact *be caused* by temperature. In other words, the same type (monticolor, for example) may be yellow at low altitudes and dark at higher elevations.  The two forms of monticolor are different *only* in coloration, no other characteristics.

"When the pertinent literature on the genetic basis of colour is discussed and cross breeding results are given, there is never mention of controls for seasonal effects or temperature conditions during brood rearing. So ... the genetic basis of colour is somewhat tentative"  from "Honeybees of Africa", by H. R. Hepburn (1998).

Color can be affected by seasonal variations, and studies have shown, by artificially raising changing the temperature of the brood nest.  Finally, dark color can be a dominant characteristic, hiding yellow color genes. (Kulinecevic, 1966, crossed lamarckii  and sahariensis). Size, too, is highly misleading, since the same races in different locales exhibit different size and the size of the bees is affected by the size of comb.

Interesting, the size of comb that bees build *is* an excellent indication of racial type or origin. The worker and drone cells of the African races are all distinctly smaller than those of Europe. The smaller cells indicate the separate populations and possible lineage of African and European races.

"There is a final and remarkable aspect of cell size in African bees." When queenless, pure capensis bees built comb of *only* worker cells. European races build drone comb when queenless. In areas where scutellata and capensis hybridize, the bees produced a combination of worker and drone at a ration of 5 to 1. (from "Honeybees of Africa", by H. R. Hepburn)