> much of it, also dries up. If my memory serves me right - I don't have any
> reference on this to hand - it was dry during the glaciations, when sea
level
> was significantly lower than today. In that case bees would have been able
to
> cross from Africa to Spain a few thousand years ago, on the same basis as
> they crossed from continental Europe to what is now Britain, across what
is
> now the English Channel and the North Sea.

Although possible, I think any possible land bridge would have been
millions, not thousands of years ago, but who really knows.

Here are two references:
http://www.soc.soton.ac.uk/JRD/HYDRO/hlb/abgiblec.html
http://www.uca.es/otros/anasim_gibraltar/english.html

Personally, I suspect that commerce should have moved everything around in
that area from time to time.

Whether the bees have been there weeks or centuries is interesting, since we
think that the Spanish may have brought their bees to the new world!

DNA techniques are quite recent and comparisons depend completely on having
correctly identified samples in the first place.

If the bees brought to America in the first place were Africanised, and
tended -- unlike those of the recent wave -- to gather and remain in pockets
here and there under pressure from Europeanization and domestic beekeeping,
then maybe current spotty sampling and DNA identification is flawed.

I think you can all see where I am going with this...

allen

********** with apologies to Adrian :) **********
*
*    "We not only believe what we see:
*  to some extent we see what we believe."
*
*                           Richard Gregory (1970)
*
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