Hi Chris

There is a paper that looked at the DNA in the mitochondria of Africanized bees.  Such DNA is passed down from mother queen to daughter.  Matrilinial inheritance.  The outcome seems to be that the great majority have Am scullata mitochondrial types, but a small percentage are typical of other bees, particularly Am adansonii.

Interpreting this is perhaps not so straightforward.  Does Am scutellata itself carry a wider range of mitotypes than those sampled, and could it be harbouring those rare adansonii types - or did adansonii also give rise to Africanized bees?

Details (available to all on the internet I believe) and a quote are below.

all the best

Gavin

Genetic structure of Africanized honeybee
populations (Apis mellifera L.) from Brazil and
Uruguay viewed through mitochondrial DNA
COI–COII patterns
T Collet1, KM Ferreira1, MC Arias2, AEE Soares3 and MA Del Lama1
Heredity (2006) 97, 329–335

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v97/n5/pdf/6800875a.pdf

The main patterns observed in Brazil are the African
A4 (68%) and A1 (26%) haplotypes (Figure 4). The
proportion of A4 mitotype is higher in populations from
Central and Southern Brazil (being also the most
common in Uruguayan samples), whereas the frequency
of A1 pattern increases toward the north. The Pearson
test indicated a negative and significant correlation
between the A1 frequency and latitude (r¼0.561;
Po0.0001). The C1 mitotype is present in some southern
populations (Table 1), whereas the mellifera pattern was
not observed in the Brazilian colonies and only one
Uruguayan sample showed the M4 pattern.

Seven populations from Brazil and one from Uruguay
contained A26 (as determined by restriction patterns
and their P sequences) (Figure 2), a mitotype also
observed by Franck et al. (2001) in the Southwest African
A. m. adansonii.

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