Antonio Carlos Garros Stort (1939-2005) 

Prof. Stort dedicated almost all his life to the study of the aggressiveness of Africanized bees, although he was well aware of the fact that he was extremely allergic to them, and that the bees could put an end to his life with only a few stings. However, he always had an anti-allergic medicine in his pocket, especially when he went out to perform aggressiveness tests with “his” bees. 

Early in his career, while Prof. Stort was teaching in Araraquara, he was invited by Prof. Warwick Kerr to do his Ph.D. studies at the Bee Lab of the Genetics Department of the School of Medicine of the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto, SP. 

There he collaborated in numerous lab projects during the first years of existence of the Department. In that lab, with Prof. Kerr as adviser, Stort and I did, at the same time, all the experimental work of our doctoral theses on Africanized honey bees. He finished his thesis entitled “Genetic study on the aggressiveness of Apis mellifera in 1972”. In 1979, Stort presented his Associate Professor thesis, “Genetic study of morphological characters and their relation to defensive behavior in honey bees of the genus Apis”. 

He was the first scientist who developed methods for the study of the aggressive behavior of Africanized bees; these methods are still used today all over the world. He was also the first one to describe the genes that control aggressiveness in honey bees. Prof. Stort published about 180 scientific papers in Brazilian and international specialized journals, 5 book chapters and 2 books, and became a world-renowned expert in honey-bee aggressiveness. --- from the Obituary by Prof. Dr. Lionel Segui Gonçalves

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Quoting from Dr. Stort:

No simple Mendelian inheritance is involved.

> The F1 bees indicate that the persecution trait tended to be ruled by dominant factors in Italian bees, which are gentler; however, if this were a case of inheritance with a phenomenon of simple dominance, different segregations should occur in the two types of backcrosses. Thus, a larger number of gentle colonies (or only gentle colonies) should appear in the Italian backcrosses, since all Italian virgin queens from colony 7 carry the gene for gentleness. 

> The appearance of similar segregations in the two types of backcrosses (1 gentle:1 aggressive) suggests that the persecution trait is not controlled by simple dominant inheritance. In addition, the means obtained for hives of africanized backcrosses and of Italian backcrosses were 93.74 +/- 28.10 and 72.55 +/- 29.80, close to the data obtained for the parental africanized hive no. 63 (whose mean was 89.88 +/- 21.39), which strengthens the idea that no simple Mendelian inheritance is involved.

GENETIC STUDY OF THE AGGRESSIVENESS OF TWO SUBSPECIES OF Apis mellifera IN BRAZIL. VI. OBSERVER PERSECUTION BEHAVIOR. (1980)

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Pete

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