On Aug 15, 1:51=A0am, Charlie Kroeger <ckro...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> Thanks for that clear voice -JZ you may not be an entomologist but you
> sound like one.
I'm new to this list, so I don't know if that's a compliment or not,
judging from the tone of this discussion.
But as for queen bees mating with their own half-sisters, my
understanding is that a queen's mating flight will generally take her
farther than the typical drone flies to find a congregation area.
This gives her a better chance to mate outside of her family. Along
with that, I think there is some evidence that poor brood patterns
within an apiary can result from inbreeding--that is, developing brood
can spontaneously abort, and be removed by the workers, leaving an
empty spot in the capped brood pattern that is visible to the
beekeeper. This usually occurs when a bee yard is isolated, and the
only drones available are related. This may be more of a problem as
all the feral bees are disappearing. Alas, I can not refer you to any
scientific journal to back up what I have said, but I gleaned this
from a discussion I had last summer with Dr. James Ellis, of the
University of Florida, Gainsville.
Also on the subject of inbreeding, varroa mites do mate with their
siblings, and quite shamelessly in front of their own mothers'
proverbial noses. But there have been many thousands of generations
for them to work the bugs out of the system, so to speak. Any
individual who was unfit probably didn't reproduce, thus the bad
combinations of genes that we would associate with inbreeding are
removed from the gene pool, as in the above example with the bees.
Their reproductive cycle is very rapid (egg to egg-layer in less than
a month), and thus they have many chances (as a species) for
mutations. Mutations are probably rare, given their small genome, but
it still give them hope of a little variation here and there. That's
how the genus diverged into more than one species in the first place.
Well, that was far more long-winded than I intended.
-JZ
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