> To determine whether the ancestry of a bee population comes from queen producers or elsewhere, any functionality of mitochondrial DNA is not relevant.  Instead it serves only as an accurate way to trace ancestry. The analysis of mitotypes has clearly shown that a number of populations of honey bees in North America are not descended from the managed stocks propagated today.


By those lights, the fact that they are descended from X matriline is also not relevant to any functionality. The fact that my DNA traces back to Scotland and not Spain, means little or nothing in terms of what I can do. On the other, I grant you can't really prove a negative


> That, or some likeness of that, is the vital fact. You never can get at the literal limitation of living facts. They disguise themselves by the very strength of their life: get told again and again in different ways by all manner of people; — the literalness of them is turned topsy-turvy, inside-out, over and over again; — then the fools come and read them wrong side upwards, or else, say there never was a fact at all. 

> Nothing delights a true blockhead so much as to prove a negative; — to show that everybody has been wrong. Fancy the delicious sensation, to an empty-headed creature, of fancying for a moment that he has emptied everybody else’s head as well as his own! nay, that, for once, his own hollow bottle of a head has had the best of other bottles, and has been first empty; — first to know — nothing.

— John Ruskin

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