Hi Mike

 > So, you are saying that if we had the equipment, we could identify
 > each race or a hybrid thereof by identifying the presence or absence
 > of certain alleles.  Correct?

You cannot put it in quite such simple terms, but you should not use 
this technique first.

You can only use a test like this as the last resort, if you have a bee 
colony that looks like AMM, behaves like AMM and has been morphometricly 
verified as AMM with a high degree of purity over many years, then you 
can go the extra mile and weed out those few colonies that still might 
contain Ligustica genes (as yet we cannot eliminate any other race than 
Ligustica, but as we in UK see this as the most destructive interloper 
to our natural bees it is very helpful to us).

Your first priority should be analysis of the population by means of 
detailed records of each colony in the population.

Refine your population based on recognisable behaviours.

When you have behaviour patterns that fit the race, you can use 
morphometry to establish the degree of hybridisation.

Make further selections based on your findings.

So now we have a population that has the behaviours that we desired and 
is getting close to being un-hybridised

As we now have pretty good specimens (very high purity), the 
discrimination for further improvement has to be a bigger sledgehammer, 
enter DNA, now we can look in the nooks and crannies for alleles that 
should not be there.

There is no point in doing this testing until a very high degree of 
purity is existent( 99%+ pure by other means ).


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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