Genetic pollution and number of matings in a black honey bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) population

Abstract

In the south-east of France, local honey bees possess only the B allele at the MDH locus, whereas the races which are usually imported into this area do not have this allele. The proportion of non-B genes in a sample of drones was used to measure the "genetic pollution" in the local population. Within the course of a breeding scheme of local bees, 99 queens, whose genotypes are BB, were naturally mated between April 25 and June 10, 1985 at la Tave (Gard, France). Twenty daughters-workers of each queen were analysed at the MDH locus. The frequency of the B allele in drones that mated with these queens is estimated by the proportion of workers with genotype BB and the genetic pollution by the cumulated frequency of the other alleles. The sampling variances of these frequencies involve a coefficient which is a function of the average number of drones mated with a queen. This latter parameter is estimated through the maximum likelihood method. In addition to the three well-known alleles, a rare allele (frequency=0.0055), possibly equivalent to the S1 allele described by Badino et al. (1983), has been found in three different colonies. Cumulating the frequencies of the non-B alleles results in an estimation of the genetic pollution equal to 0.0394 (±0.0071). This low value allows us to proceed to the next step of the selection project. The mean number of drones mated to a queen is 12.4 with a (10.4-19.3) confidence interval at the 90% level.

Apis mellifera pomonella, a new honey bee subspecies from Central Asia

“…As a further complication, there are examples of gene flow between described subspecies. This phenomenon has been studied and described in terms of genetic introgression and hybridization using a variety of molecular markers (Badino et al, 1984(Badino et al, , 1988Cornuet et al, 1986;Smith et al, 1991;Meixner et al, 1993;Hepburn et al, 1998;Franck et al, 2000). …”

Biodiversity, conservation and current threats to European honeybees

“…Honeybees from France (Cornuet et al, 1982(Cornuet et al, , 1986, Italy (Badino et al, 1983;Sheppard and Berlocher, 1985;Comparini and Biasolo, 1991), Sicily (Badino et al, 1985), Norway (Sheppard and Berlocher, 1984), Turkey (Kandemir and Kence, 1995;Kandemir et al, 2000Kandemir et al, , 2005, Spain (Smith and Glenn, 1995;Arias et al, 2006), Albania (Dedej et al, 1996), Greece (Badino et al, 1988;Bouga et al, 2005a) and Bulgaria (Ivanova et al, 2007) have been analysed with this methodology. The allozymic information depicted from the Old World subspecies has been used to study gene flow between European-derived and African-derived honeybee populations in the New World, as 278 P. De la Rúa et al reviewed in Sheppard and Smith (2000;see also Schneider et al, 2004).…”

Maximum likelihood estimates of gene frequencies and racial admixture in Apis mellifera L. (Africanized honeybees)

“…This frequency depends not only on the number of matings with drones having a particular allele, but also on sperm competition events before and after copulations (Laidlaw & Page, 1986;Page, 1986), and on the extent of mixing of the different ejaculates (Taber, 1955). Adams et al (1977) and Cornuet et al (1986) proposed a discrete distribution for these male gene frequencies, based on a binomial sampling from n mated males, where n follows a truncated Poisson distribution. We prefer to use a more flexible continuous distribution, the Dirichlet distribution, as the density function of the fertilization frequencies of the male alleles stored in the population of spermathecae.…”