Hi Peter > I don't suppose there are anything like pure races in the USA; You won't really know until you test, the degree of hybridisation shows up fairly readily by simple procedures. Starting from scratch you might need a large sample size to make much sense of the results, but if you were to pull the right wings from a set of 90 bees from one single colony after killing them in the freezer, mount the wings on glass slides and scan them using a film scanner of higher than 2400 x 2400 optical resolution, the resulting images could be fed to an application... DrawWing is a good one and it is free... http://www.cyf-kr.edu.pl/~rotofils/drawwing.html Then the files that application produces can be fed into a spreadsheet like MorphPlot (generated by Peter Edwards, often on this list) also free and available from... http://www.dave-cushman.net/computing/downloads.html there are all sorts of other morphometric goodies on that download page as well. You will end up with a scattergram plot that will indicate how much hybridisation is in the sample and if the hybridisation itself is not too high it might also indicate the principle racial components. It needs care, but is not difficult and is certainly not beyond the realms of the ordinary beekeeper. > We are still learning about the effect of diverse drone genetics, but you > must realize that the various bee types have been shipped all over this > country willy nilly for a hundred years. For this reason alone, I am > suspicious of the claim that the genetic pool in the USA is too narrow. The widespread use of transport for queens in US means that naturalisation does not get a chance to occur and stability to develop, but stability requires selection to achieve it and little of this is done at local level in US. If you like the 'mixture' never gets a chance to settle into layers that can be identified. Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable) ****************************************************** * Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm * ******************************************************