On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Peter Borst wrote:

> Eva Crane in her excellent book "Bees and Beekeeping" (1990), makes
> the following points:
>
> "Where colonies of both Africanized and European bees are present,
> drones of the former drift into colonies of the latter, whereas
> European drones rarely drift into Africanized colonies (Rinderer,
> 1985). ... In a 'mixed' area many more Africanized than European
> drones are therefore present (in 'mixed' apiaries, 91% were
> Africanized -- Rinderer, 1987)."

Is it possible that one of the reasons that Africanised honey bees
tend to replace European honeybees is that we give no drone comb to
our bees, resulting in an artificial scarcity of European drones?
This would favor propagation by feral AHB colonies which produce a
normal percentage of drones.

Best regards,

Donald Aitken
Edmonton Alberta Canada