Allen writes:

> That French example has been very interesting to me since I first heard of it
> years ago and has increased my tolerance for ideas which are seem to run
> against my education and current knowledge but are not inconsistent with
> my experience.

> Interestingly, the French example also lends some slight credibility to one of
> Dee's most unlikely claims: that her bees are a separate population and
> not AHB.

My comments:

All three of these situations is quite different. In the Landes district, there is a distinct population of kept bees that the locals believe is native to the region and adapted to the floral conditions. They are trying to make a case for protecting their bees from the influx of non-native commercial honey bees. We are not talking about feral bees here, but hive bees and the old local versus out of towner battle.

In Dee's case, just the opposite occurred. The Arizona desert has exploded with feral hives to the extent that it is impossible to keep regular European bees without constant requeening. The region is saturated with African drones, so the likelihood of queens NOT mating with them is slim to none. The law in Arizona is that you can have any kind of bees in your hive, no testing is done. However, property owners are compelled to have wild hives removed; again, no testing done.

In Joe's case, I am not clear what the issue is. He states that there is a separate distinct feral population that can be readily distinguished from run-of-the-mill commercial stock but he doesn't say how, other than that they are not in hives. We all know bees swarm and take to the woods. How would we distinguish between a swarm that escaped from a kept hive and one that came from a colony that had been living in a tree? What are the distinguishing features?

There has been a lot of work done on the mitochondrial DNA but nobody really has any explanation for what it all means. They can show that bees are an admixture and that some populations are *different* from others, but this is hardly earthshaking. Being different doesn't automatically confer some unusual value or merit.

PLB

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