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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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From:
"Cryberg, Dick" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 1 Nov 2023 02:43:45 -0400
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 A feral (from Latin fera 'a wild beast') animal or plant is one that lives
in the wild but is descended from domesticated individuals.

Wild - living in nature without human control or care not tame;   : growing
or produced in nature not grown or farmed by people.

It seems to me the choices are wild or feral.  Maybe someone else has
another word but I do not.  For the new world I would lean towards feral as
they are 100% descended from domestics.  You might want to lean towards
using wild if they have been on their own long enough and you have evidence
they are mostly reproductively isolated from domestics.  Mitochondrial data
tells me nothing about how much breeding with domestics is going on.  All a
rare mitochondria in a fera,l that is not found in domestics, tells me is
the expected statistics of inheritance are working as they should be
expected to work.    So, how long is long enough?  The data is fairly murky
and species dependent, but usually inbreeding that happened at generation
one or earlier no longer counts after 15 or 20 generations.  On that basis
maybe 15 generations of isolation could be enough.

Short of a lot of DNA data I have no idea if there may be places in the
rest of the world where honey bees are isolated enough to have had so
little exposure to domestics that you can truly call them wild.  If such a
place exists I would think it would be in Africa.

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