> Are we talking "traits" that were observed or do the bees actually have
> capensis genes?
<snip>
> Only trying to establish the extent of the problem, since different
> races of bees can have, from time to time, traits of others, such as
> aggression, propolis buildup, etc.. But if we are talking genes, then it
> is an entirely different problem.

That is correct. AFAIK, the only evidence is by inference.  Who knows,
though maybe there is a paper wending its way through peer review.

In the meantime, I have to say, having seen Lusbys bees and worked with them
over three days, and that the bees they have are smaller, and smart, but not
particularly vicious.  On that latter characteristic, I would rate them in
the middle of all the European types I have worked over the years and much
milder than some Australian and New Zealand stock I have owned. They were
mostly quiet on the comb and quite nice to work. They were instantly aware
when we opened a cell to look for varroa and immediately one or several
would examine the probe.  We never found more than one varroa per cell and
only found one in a sealed cell.  We almost always found one in the
occasional cells opened by the bees at the coloured-eye pupa stage, but the
foundress was invariably non-reproductive.

Dee claims that the thelytoky trait has been in the Lusby bees since long
before the AHB furor and that their bees actually do raise new queens and
that the Lusbys actually seek the thelytoky trait when breeding their bees,
since the hives will raise a queen even when at the laying worker condition,
and tolerate multiple queens.  when requeening, she just smokes a virgin in
and claims good success.

Moreover she claims that she believes that the idea that there were no honey
bees in America before the white man is as erroneous as the idea that
Columbus was the first to discover America, but just as widely believed (My
comparison, not Dee's).  She cites cave paintings, and also the fact that a
search of Spanish records has failed to confirm the long held belief that
the Spanish brought the first honey bees to the New World.

Dee believes that the bees they manage have some of the original American
bee stock in them and that this is where the thelytoky trait originates.
She has also studied the matter in detail, apparently turning up papers
describing this trait being observed in European bees long before the
current hubbub about cape bees.

I am hoping that she will cite some here and that she and Barry will also
get the BeeSource items indexed in a way that those of us who are not
inclined to dig and hunt can follow the Lusby story in easy bites.

Determining the actual origin of any bees in the world is a difficult job,
since bees have been moved around the world by man time and again, and some
of the basic assumptions about what stock belongs where is suspect. Bees are
being moved around the world constantly, both overtly and surreptitiously,
even into and out of supposedly quarantined areas. I notice that a
well-known Australian queen breeder (I bought many queens and packages  from
him over the years) was recently convicted and fined for carrying nine
queens into Australia in a pen.

allen