Hi All/Andy Thanks Andy for the e-mail supporting a dubious view of modern day ways of 'discriminating' bees. You mentioned a few cases where bees are difficult to distinguish on a genetic basis. I think for bees there are a few ways of distinguishing bees with DNA as the foundation for this. One is to amplify up some pieces of DNA with special enzymes and then to use other enzymes which cut DNA at specific sequences to chop it up. Hence it is very similar to running a program through a book and telling it to create a paragraph at certain word - eg every time there is a the press enter. As a result a number of different size chunks develop and these move at specific speeds if put through a get which slows things down, The smaller the piece the faster it goes. In the end you get a line which is a fingerprint. I don't like this sytem that much as it is subject to contamination. It is however not so expensive and can be used on a large scale. I think it is better than morphometrics. If somebody messes up they can get contaminants in. The primers used in the initial step are universal primers so they can magnify everything up. In forensic labs, the rooms used for PCR (the enzyme reaction that amplifies the DNA) are seperated from the places where DNA is prepared and so on. DNA froms aerosols which can float around in the air and contaminate reactions giving false results. Most bee research labs I am sure suffer from at least a small amount of such contamination as this is not industrial science where big money is involved - in industry one cannot afford to publish incorrect results as the factory you build will not work. In bee science very few people are ever even going to bother duplicating ones work. Another system is to actually sequence certain sections of the DNA. This is quite neat. But a bee has a lot of chromosomes, and hence one has to select a little piece that is representative of the whole animal. People often simplify this by looking at mitochondrial DNA. This is DNA in little organelles that live in the cell and produce the cells energy. Traditional science says these are passed on from mother to child, and never from the father/drone, so theoretically one has a pure source of DNA. Other research has shown that mitochondria actually evolve over time in various parts of the animals body, so taking mitochondria from the stomach and wings will give slightly different sequences for so called characteristic bits of their genome. So that is not so good either. It has also been shown that in bees mitochondrial DNA from the drones is passed to the offspring. So what else is there to do? Maybe one can look at little bits of DNA in the actual bees chromosomes. As such little is known about the genome of the honeybee. It has still to be sequenced. Areas are known that are good for distinguishing bees. but how does one decide which ares? I suspect that observer bias may always be a problem with an animal as large as complex as a bee. Depending on where one looks one could prove anything. My geuss would be with bees the best way of assesing a bees productivity and temperament will be not through any of there above techniques, but rather through a simple record of productivity, temperament and so on. Oneday in the future we will be able to use the above techniques, but a lot of develompment is needed - which will come from other richer areas of science as spin off technologies. Just my thoughts Keep well Garth Garth Cambray Camdini Apiaries Grahamstown Apis mellifera capensis Eastern Cape Prov. South Africa Time = Honey After careful consideration, I have decided that if I am ever a V.I.P the I. may not stand for important. (rather influential, ignorant, idiotic, intelectual, illadvised etc)