Genetic structure of drone congregation areas of Africanized honeybees in southern Brazil

Abstract

As yet, certain aspects of the Africanization process are not well understood, for example, the reproductive behavior of African and European honeybees and how the first Africanized swarms were formed and spread. Drone congregation areas (DCAs) are the ideal place to study honeybee reproduction under natural conditions since hundreds of drones from various colonies gather together in the same geographical area for mating. In the present study, we assessed the genetic structure of seven drone congregations and four commercial European-derived and Africanized apiaries in southern Brazil, employing seven microsatellite loci for this purpose. We also estimated the number of mother-colonies that drones of a specific DCA originated from. Pairwise comparison failed to reveal any population sub-structuring among the DCAs, thus indicating low mutual genetic differentiation. We also observed high genetic similarity between colonies of commercial apiaries and DCAs, besides a slight contribution from a European-derived apiary to a DCA formed nearby. Africanized DCAs seem to have a somewhat different genetic structure when compared to the European.

Varroa destructor Parasitism and Genetic Variability at Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Drone Congregation Areas and Their Associations With Environmental Variables in Argentina

“…However, the DCAs appeared to be more diverse in terms of the quantity and frequencies of the detected haplotypes. These results agree with previous works in which DCAs concentrate drones from several apiaries and feral colonies (Baudry et al, 1998;Collet et al, 2009). Related to the comparisons between DCA and apiaries, we observed a similar pattern of genetic diversity for the temperate region, where the beekeeping is intensive and principally based on European-derived honey bees.…”

Landscape Analysis of Drone Congregation Areas of the Honey Bee,Apis mellifera

“…Understanding geographical and other characteristics of DCAs could help develop an easier way to find a larger number of these areas using the same pheromone-assisted search methods. Identifying even a few DCAs facilitates the estimation of genetic diversity and genetic structure (i.e., Collet et al 2009). Currently, the health of bees can be monitored using gene expression or microbiological analysis (Evans 2006; Robinson et al 2008) on worker bees collected from colonies in a sampling area.…”

“…It is, therefore, possible to use male bees at a DCA as a sample of genetically distinct colonies in the area and examine, at the least, prevalence of disease organisms or stress and immune gene expression in these male bees. Defining mating behavior is a very important tool for developing strategies to preserve the genetic variation found in the native habitats of the bee (Strange 2004; Collet et al 2009), helping to maintain resilient agricultural bee populations.…”

Assessing the density of honey bee colonies at ecosystem scales

“…Apis mellifera capensis is prone to social parasitism and causes losses of up to 10 000 commercial bee colonies in South Africa every year (Allsopp, 1992(Allsopp, , 1993Beekman et al, 2008). Drone trapping provides a convenient method for broadly sampling a honey bee population (Moritz et al, 2007;Collet et al, 2009). Single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping can be used to determine the likely subspecies of the sampled males Harpur et al, 2015) and could potentially be used to determine the extent of a new incursion.…”