Jerry wrote:
> the lack of discussion by  Bee-L indicates that the key points went right past most people  on Bee-L.

Hmm. Maybe it took some time to digest.

The story of Bill Wilson is certainly chastening. However, one must
separate the two issues: Bill may have been sidetracked for suggesting
that Disappearing Disease might be related to work done by the USDA,
but that hardly proves a genetic cause for Disappearing Disease. No
evidence has been found to support the idea that northern honey bee
populations are either polluted by African genes or that their genetic
base has been precipitously narrowed, causing widespread collapse.

Early on Steve Sheppard surveyed the US bee population to establish
the genetic makeup of the bees BEFORE the South American strain became
ubiquitous. He found a lot of African derived genetic material already
here, but he points out that the types of tests cannot easily
distinguish WHERE in Africa they came from. In fact, they could be
traced back to Spain.

Finally, as many have pointed out, widespread die-offs were reported
in the 1800s, and every few decades ever since. Perhaps the fact that
so many people were trying to make a living from bees made the huge
fluctuations much more critical than they would have been otherwise.
After all, honey keeps and if you got a good year yo had enough honey
to last through several bad ones. Bees might regularly die off, but
nature has adequately provided for that by giving them the urge to
swarm.

Steve Sheppard writes:

> Over 25% of the Africanized colonies from Argentina expressed a composite haplotype (ALBA), that was found in north African honey bees, but not in sub-Saharan A. m. scutellata. This raises the possibility that the proportion of haplotypes reported to originate from A. m. scutellata may have been overestimated in other New World populations, as well. If true, this could partially explain discrepancies among studies based on allozyme, morphological and mtDNA data.

> In our limited sampling of Old World populations, we found the haplotype (ALBA) only in colonies of the subspecies A. m. intermissa from Morocco. However, given that several studies report clinal variation or evidence of hybridization between the bees of North Africa and Spain, the possibility exists that the ALBA pattern arrived in Argentina with early Spanish settlers.

> Further studies of Africanized honey bee mtDNA should be cognizant of the potential for erroneous assignment of subspecific parental origins, unless a combination of appropriate tests are used.

-- 
Peter L Borst
Danby, NY USA
42.35, -76.50
http://picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst

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