> To determine whether the ancestry of a bee population comes from queen producers or elsewhere, any functionality of mitochondrial DNA is not relevant.

By the way, I was not referring to mtDNA alone, but full genome sequencing. In either case, it's not a straw man argument because there are people who think that the functionality of DNA is well known and if some bee has some DNA that is descended from bees of Italy, then those bees should look and act like Italian bees, from Venetia. I realize *you* don't think that, I feel as if I am conversing with everyone and trying to address the prevailing mindset. There are people who buy Italian or Carniolan bees expecting some type of performance based on that choice. 

Further by the way, it occurred to me that when Italian, Carniolan, Caucasian bees were first described, it didn't occur to the writers that the various colonies were individuals from those regions, and that while those individual colonies may observable qualities, it does not therefore follow that all or even most Italian &c. bees would be like those individuals. Never mind what happened: they were all put in a mixmaster and scrambled, and then the resultant offspring were labled X, Y, or Z mostly dependent on coloration or temperament. 

Again, it is not my intention to try to negate everything other people think for the sake of "proving everybody wrong," but in the interest of falsification of the errors, perhaps the correct result will appear. I think the correct result is supported by Harpur, & al, that we have a highly diverse, multiple lineage honey bee stock in this country, and that's a good thing. As Luther Burbank found, with are large variety to choose from, you likely can find better types (depending on what you are after). 

Again, the line breeding approach of enhancing certain traits like was done with the Starline, the Russian, and the VSH lines, has a built-in pitfall, raising the ugly specter of inbreeding. The people who succeed in line breeding maintain the trait on a variety of backgrounds. When I worked with mice, I would often put particular "knockout" lines onto different mouse backgrounds (black 6, castaneus, etc) to ascertain whether the phenotype was clearly independent of background. I also bough in fresh stock annually, to prevent inbreeding effects.

PLB

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