"what kind of DNA analysis would confirm and that a colony is Africanized"

Do some kind of map of the nuclear DNA.  For example, one common approach is a SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) map.  You pick out several thousand SNPs scattered over the whole genome and look and see which polymorphism seems linked to Africanization and bad behavior and have a different base from the same locus in European honey bees.  You dump the data in a puter and pretty standard canned programs will crunch the data and give you a % Africanization once you have set up the needed back ground information.  There are other markers besides SNPs that can be used.  What you are looking for is markers that are strongly linked to regions that are the direct cause of bad behavior and different than the markers in well behaved bees.  That tells you something close to that location is active in influencing behavior.  It may be a gene.  It may be a gene promoter or gene regulator or switch, in which case the actual gene may be a million base pairs away.  In any case you need a data base from a half dozen or ten known individuals from both African and known non African stocks.  Once you have the data base you compare the result from a suspect bee to the data base.

This approach is used all the time for a whole variety of genetic problems.  You can build a family tree for example.  Say you want to know the family tree for cattle and how we came to have all our different beef and milk breeds.  You can look at such maps and the puter will construct a family tree showing the branches from common ancestors. Such family trees generally contain some big surprises you would never have guessed by simply looking at phenotype.  This same type of analysis is routinely done on bulls that are potential AI sperm donors.  In Holsteins we have enough data today we can tell from this type of genetic analysis if a bull is worth doing any progeny testing and save a lot of time and money by eliminating the majority that will fail such testing.  Potentially we could do the same with the honey bee.  Develop maps for things like mite resistance or honey production and the queen producers could select queen mothers that had the right genetic stuff or do II with screened drones that had the right genetic stuff.  As I understand it, a form of this technique is how Saskatraz queens were developed in Canada.  Within the next 20 years I think this approach will be common in breeding bees.  And my bet is some will still be bitching about bad queens.

Dick

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