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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
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Thu, 15 Oct 2020 08:07:11 -0400
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> From my understanding, the modern species of honey bees radiated out of Central Africa/Middle east and have all evolved separately from that point.

Not to be a pain, but that source is 20 years old. More recent work (2020) states:

Despite the growth in the availability of sequence data for honey bees, the phylogeny of the species remains a subject of controversy. Most notably, the geographic origin of honey bees is uncertain, as are the relationships among its constituent lineages and subspecies.

Although more gene sequences from across the entire native range of A. mellifera are available now than ever before, a number of long-standing questions has still not been answered. Notably, the geographic origin of the Western honey bee has historically been a subject of controversies

Analyses of complete mitochondrial genomes have recovered A. m. mellifera as the basalmost subspecies, thus placing the origin of honey bees within northern Europe. A European origin of honey bees does not seem unreasonable, as the oldest unequivocal fossil representatives of the genus Apis are known from the Oligocene of France and Germany, and fossil European honey bees also show high degrees of morphological disparity. 
 
On the other hand, given that all other living species of the genus Apis occur in Asia, the idea that A. mellifera may have originally dispersed from the east has enjoyed lasting popularity since the 1950s.  The relationships among the individual subspecies of A. mellifera are likewise unclear, with studies yielding ambigious results.

Tihelka, E., Cai, C., Pisani, D., & Donoghue, P. C. (2020). Mitochondrial genomes illuminate the evolutionary history of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera). Scientific reports, 10(1), 1-10.

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