Highly polymorphic DNA markers in an Africanized honey bee population in Costa Rica

Abstract

Two genetic markers (the mtDNA COI-COII intergenic region and the microsatellite A7) with high levels of variability in South African and European honey bees were analyzed in wild swarms of Africanized honey bees (Apis mellifera) from Costa Rica. Allelic or haplotypic frequencies revealed high levels of genetic variability at these loci in this population. Most of the alleles were African alleles, although some European-derived alleles were also present. Differences in the frequencies of African alleles between African and Africanized samples were minor, which could be explained by founder effects occurring during the introduction of African honey bee populations into South America.<br>Dois marcadores genéticos (a região intergénica mitocondrial COI-COII e o microsatélite A7), com altos níveis de variabilidade em populações de abelhas melíferas da África do Sul e Europa, foram analisados em uma amostra de enxames naturais da Costa Rica. As freqüências alélicas e haplotípicas na amostra africanizada mostraram altos níveis de diversidade nestes loci. A maioria dos alelos são de origem africana, embora alguns alelos de origem européia foram observados. As mudanças nas freqüências dos alelos de origem africana entre as abelhas da África do Sul e as abelhas da população africanizada são de baixa magnitude e podem ter sido causadas pelo efeito fundador que ocorreu na introdução da abelha africana na América do Sul

Genetic structure of Africanized honeybee populations (Apis mellifera L.) from Brazil and Uruguay viewed through mitochondrial DNA COI–COII patterns

“…The A1 haplotype showed a clinal increase, toward North and Northeast Brazil. Africanized populations sampled from Colombia (Prada, 2004), Venezuela (Clarke et al, 2001), Costa Rica (Segura, 2000) and Mexico (Franck et al, 2001) also showed a predominance of A1 and A4 types, but the A1 pattern was more frequent in all these countries, except in Venezuela, where there is a small excess of A4. Data from Moritz et al (1994), Garnery et al (1995) and Franck et al (2001) show that A4 is more frequent in the South African populations, whereas A1 increases in frequency toward Northern Africa.…”

“…Such patterns were described at low frequencies in Mexico (Clarke et al, 2001) even before the arrival of the Africanized swarms. Moreover, rare M haplotypes (very common in Spain) are still observed in countries such as Costa Rica (Segura, 2000) and Mexico (Clarke et al, 2001;Franck et al, 2001). However, on the basis of the great increase in the frequency of A haplotypes with the Africanization process, most of the colonies with A pattern must have originated from the introduction of African bees to Brazil in the 1950s.…”

Identification of Africanized honey bees through wing morphometrics: two fast and efficient procedures

“…Though molecular methods work well for identifying Africanized bees (Hall, 1988;Hall and Muralidharan, 1989;Smith et al, 1989;Sheppard et al, 1991a;Segura, 2000;Clarke et al, 2002;Whitfield et al, 2006), they are expensive, require specially-trained personnel and are time consuming. Morphometric identification techniques, which have improved considerably due to new computational techniques, are currently more practical since they require little technical knowledge or specialized equipment.…”

“…Various methods have been developed to identify Africanized bees, including analyses of isozymes (Contel et al, 1977;Del Lama et al, 1988), mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms (Hall and Muralidharan, 1989;Smith et al, 1989;Sheppard et al, 1991a, b;Segura, 2000), cuticular hydrocarbons (Francis et al, 1985), and nuclear DNA (Hall, 1988;Clarke et al, 2002;Whitfield et al, 2006). However, these biochemical and molecular methods…”

Molecular markers as a tool for population and evolutionary studies of stingless bees

“…In Apis mellifera and Apis cerana, population studies have been developed using both mtDNA and microsatellite analysis and have increased our comprehension about subspecies population dynamics, biogeography, introgression, and evolution (Franck et al, 1998(Franck et al, , 2000aSegura, 2000;Sheppard and Smith, 2000;De la Rúa et al, 2001Paar et al, 2004;Sušnik et al, 2004). Similarly, morphometric analysis combined with molecular data has been applied to study intogression in honey bees (Meixner et al, 1993(Meixner et al, , 2000.…”