"I remain troubled by the focus that has remained on finding feral honey bees and studying their genome."

There is a great deal we could likely learn if anyone were actually "studying their genome."  But, it turns out that the honey bee genome is unusually difficult to study.  So, instead of doing actual work to understand the genome most of what seems to be happening is various looks at parts of the mitochondrial DNA.  Do not  get me wrong.  Mitochondrial DNA studies can tell  you a great deal about the maternal ancestry line.  It tells you exactly zero about the paternal ancestry line.  And it tells you exactly zero about the nuclear DNA where all the interesting stuff sits that will impact such things as virus, bacterial or parasite resistance.  

So, what do we see when we look at honey bee mitochondrial DNA?  In the south US you see data that shows influx of Africanized bees displacing the feral off spring of our escaped domestics.  When you look at ferals you see more mitochondrial diversity than you see when you look at domestics.  Both of these observations are exactly what any rational person would expect to see so it is satisfying to see that real data confirms expectations.  Neither result is of any help at all in providing hints on how to deal better with practical problems as it is very unlikely that any particular mitochondria provides any survival advantage versus any other  mitochondria.  In fact the mitochondrial diversity seen in ferals reinforces the idea that nothing that provides extra survival advantage resides on that small chunk of DNA.

Bottom line:  If I never saw another paper about mitochondrial DNA of honey bees I would be quite happy.  But, I would be over joyed to see some data on nuclear genomes where the really interesting stuff is located that could be of real practical benefit to bee keeping.
Dick

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