"but found in a wild-living colony, wouldn't that be strong evidence
that that wild-living colony was not a recent descendent of commercial
stock?"

If a wild colony survives multiple generations the original mitochodrial DNA will be preserved.  That original mitochondrial DNA will even be 100% preserved if not a single queen in that continuous line mates with the wild stock.  In only a few generations of crossing to domestics the nuclear DNA can easy be near 100% domestic while the mitochondrial DNA is 100% wild.  Plenty of research has been done that shows that drones fly a long way fairly often to find a mate.  I think the majority of wild stocks are well inside the mating range of domestic drones and as domestics generally are present in larger numbers than wild stock colonies these days I can not see how the nuclear DNA of most wild stocks could not be mainly domestic DNA.  This argument would have been a lot weaker in a lot of areas 50 years ago.  Back then there were a lot of wild bees and a lot fewer hobby bee keepers.  But, since things like varroa and small hive beetles the number of wild colonies is far lower.  And, today hobby bee keepers are all over the place.  Where I live is heavy woods and lots of hollow trees.  Yet as near as I can tell there are nearly zero wild colonies.  I am pretty sure well below one per square mile.  If you get a mile and a half from any known domestics you are hard pressed to find a single honey bee working a great nectar resource.  But, it is pretty hard to get a mile and a half from known domestics here.

As Peter has pointed out so well any number of times our domestic stocks are so well mixed genetically that I doubt very much if any kind of genetic analysis is going to give you much meaningful information on ancestry.  Yeah, it is easy enough to make bees that look like Carnies and easy enough to make bees that look like Italians.  But that is just color and color is only a few genes.  Perhaps 20 coding genes at most?  Maybe 1% of the total coding genes?  If you looked at my sons personal genome and picked the right coding gene you would have even odds of saying he is 50% Scandinavian.  Or pick another and you would have even odds of saying 50% central or southern Europe.  In fact it is most probable that my son is more English than I am and probably is 25% Scandinavian and close to zero % central or southern European.  When you look at mitochondrial genes you are looking at a only a hand full of coding genes that are exclusively from the maternal line.  Not much different than looking at one of my nuclear genes and jumping to a conclusion of what it tells you about my ancestry.  In humans our generation time is long enough and you can look at tens of thousands of marker sites and generally get some half decent idea of ancestry.  Give humans another 40 or 50 generations and those techniques are not going to work simply because we will have managed to mix the human genome well enough world wide to resemble what we face today with honey bees.

All the ancestry stuff is by and large irrelevant anyhow.  If you push a Wright's inbreeding calculation back far enough on any living thing you will find every species is 100% inbred.  Well, we all know that is nonsense even if that is what the math says.  Every species is not so inbred you can do skin transplants between individuals and get those transplants to take like they will in a  cheetah.  The reason it is nonsense is that inbreeding does not count until recent generations. Inbreeding that happened before maybe 12 or 15 generations in the past is irrelevant.  That is not all that many generations.  For bees only 15 or at most 20 years.  So, my message is what went before that time the majority of the time simply has no significant influence on our bees today.  Now, obviously some phenotype characters can survive longer than that without human selection.  Africanized bee's tempers are an example.  But, it sure looks like even that temper is slowly getting bred out of them, probably mainly due to mixing with domestics.  What does count in terms of phenotype is what you select for generation after generation.  If you can measure it and select for it long enough you will get it.

Dick

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html