Dee writes:
> Okay, since this trait is known to be in ALL races/strains of bees....why is cape bee any different?
I have already explained in great detail why the Cape Bee is
different. But to elaborate further: evidently laying workers are
present in all colonies but under normal circumstances, their eggs are
eaten by the other workers. This is called worker policing and serves
the purpose of ensuring that all the workers, drones and queens
produced in the colony come from the reigning queen.
Look at it like a palace. The Queen wants only her offspring ruling in
the palace. If the servants start putting their own babies in the
cradles and raising them up as royalty, eventually one of them could
become Queen and throw the royalty out on their butts. So any
non-royal babies are eaten (in the honey bee colony, not the palace).
When this all breaks down is when the colony goes queenless. Then all
bets are off since the colony is doomed anyway. If a laying worker
produces a female egg, then there is a final shot at saving the
colony. This has no practical merit in beekeeping terms as far as I am
concerned. Proper beekeeping would have gotten rid of the queenless
colony long before this. This trait might seem attractive to someone
who likes to let the bees do their own thing, but modern beekeeping
has more to do with raising queens and nucs on a schedule, than the
catch as catch can method practiced under more primitive
circumstances.
The Cape Bee is *different* in that it is a disastrous parasite, which
this whole thread has been about, look at the subject! Parasitism in
the honey bee colony. The normal honey bee colony has a very effective
system for preventing this but evidently in the Cape Bee, the
thelytoky trait became dominant. And when ignorant beekeepers moved
the Cape Bee into the scutellata territory, the result was a wipe out.
Explains Robert Danka, research entomologist at the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Laboratory
in Baton Rouge, La.: "Pseudoqueens don't work like workers and they
aren't normally as reproductive as regular queens. The colony becomes
dysfunctional and you wind up with a bunch of weird misfits."
"An introduction of Cape bees to alleviate problems with Africanized
bees," he says, "would be exactly wrong for beekeeping according to
most beekeepers who have experience with both bee types in Africa."
Danka explains Cape bees would invade not only the colonies of killer
bees, but also virtually all bee colonies, causing them to become
nonproductive or to die. Cape bee genes could mix with those of our
honeybees, ruining hundreds of years of selective breeding. He adds,
"In the end, it may be summed up that, at least for beekeepers, the
problems posed by Africanized bees are less than those posed by Cape
bees."
Dee writes:
> You see to me it is man created problems by not following the bees needs in how they fit into Nature.
Yes, well, of course bees would be better off if we just left them
alone and didn't try to make a living off of their efforts. In this
regard perhaps the hobby beekeepers are the keepers of the faith
insofar as they are beekeepers because they love bees and not because
they are trying to cash them in. But seriously folks, the whole man
versus nature, man as a part of nature, nature's plan song and dance
is a dead end street.
We can discuss this until our last dying breath and never sort it out.
How can mankind be anything *other* than part of nature? Where did we
get off the merry go round? On the other hand, what -- if anything, of
our activities seem truly natural, these days? As Bill McKibben so
painfully announced in his book "The End of Nature", there is scarcely
a single thing that you can point to that hasn't been affected by
human activity from the land and sea to the air we breathe.
But this is where beekeeping goes from being science based to faith
based. When somebody starts saying that their way is better just
because its their way, and mine is not because it doesn't fit into
nature's plan nor agrees with theirs, that's when we have reached the
dead end. By the way, one could very easily make a case that the real
parasite here is the beekeeper.
KENNETH W. TUCKER:
One percent or less of the progeny from unfertilized eggs of unmated
queens and laying workers were exceptional bees, of which 97 percent
were workers, two percent gynandromorphs, and one percent mosaic
drones. Unmated queens of most lines produced only a few workers, but
one exceptional producer (37 workers) occurred in one of the
Leather-colored Italian lines, and several exceptional producers (5 to
13 workers) were found in a Yellow Italian line. The gynandromorphs
exhibited variable proportions of male and female tissues in their
external and internal morphology. Two of them had very little female
tissue and were otherwise similar to the mosaic males. The female
parts were either queen or worker in different bees. It is concluded
that the automictic workers are derived from the union of two haploid
nuclei formed by complete meiosis. Union of the two egg pronuclei
forms a diploid cleavage nucleus which develops into a worker.
Additional info:
Automictic is defined as a reproduction resulting when the set of
chromosomes acquired from the mother, pairs with an exact copy of
itself, which can be described as "half a clone". The animal still is
unique and not a clone of her mother. Geneticists confirmed a case of
birth without mating in a bonnethead shark, one of the smaller
hammerhead species. That makes sharks the fifth major vertebrate
lineage with documented virgin births. DNA analysis of its tissues
revealed no evidence of genes other than its mother's. This kind of
reproduction, parthenogenesis, "is probably more widespread" than
biologists have realized, comments Ed Heist of Southern Illinois
University in Carbondale. Parthenogenesis may seem weird to people,
but DNA analysis has confirmed some form of it among bony fish,
amphibians, reptiles, and birds. "I think mammals are the odd ones,"
Heist says.
Maybe so, but I am still with Danka, keep traveling down that road and
you wind up with a bunch of weird misfits.
--
Peter L Borst
Danby, NY USA
42.35, -76.50
http://picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst
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