# Range and Frequency of Africanized Honey Bees in California (USA)



## AmericasBeekeeper (Jan 24, 2010)

Range and Frequency of Africanized Honey Bees in California (USA)
Africanized honey bees entered California in 1994 but few accounts of their northward expansion or their frequency relative to European honey bees have been published. We used mitochondrial markers and morphometric analyses to determine the prevalence of Africanized honeybees in San Diego County and their current northward progress in California west of the Sierra Nevada crest. The northernmost African mitotypes detected were approximately 40 km south of Sacramento in California’s central valley. In San Diego County, 65% of foraging honey bee workers carry African mitochondria and the estimated percentage of Africanized workers using morphological measurements is similar (61%). There was no correlation between mitotype and morphology in San Diego County suggesting Africanized bees result from bidirectional hybridization. Seventy percent of feral hives, but only 13% of managed hives, sampled in San Diego County carried the African mitotype indicating that a large fraction of foraging workers in both urban and rural San Diego County are feral. We also found a single nucleotide polymorphism at the DNA barcode locus COI that distinguishes European and African mitotypes. The utility of this marker was confirmed using 401 georeferenced honey bee sequences from the worldwide Barcode of Life Database. Future censuses can determine whether the current range of the Africanized form is stable, patterns of introgression at nuclear loci, and the environmental factors that may limit the northern range of the Africanized honey bee.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137407


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## aunt betty (May 4, 2015)

Bi-directional hybridization?
Morpholgical?
Mitotype?
Nuclear Loci?
Georeferenced honeybee sequences?
Nucleotide polymorphism?

Nice cut and paste job. Please tell me what it means.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

Americas Beek.
Thanks for posting this reference, its an important contribution for beeks in the AHB range.









Poor Aunt Bet.
Bi-directional hybridization? -- Wild type bees are acquiring "European" and AHB genes, this is importantly different than earlier findings of overwhelming dominance of AHB inheritance.
Morpholgical? -- the "form" of the organism
Mitotype? -- the maternal (mother's ) lineage. Mitochondria (a cell organelle responsible for basic energy conversion) are strictly inherited from the mother, they possess their own RNA encoding passed from one mother to her daughter in an unbroken chain. 
Nuclear Loci? -- genes are encoded in specific location on specific chromosomes -- which are immensely long chains of amino acids strung together into a single run-on "sentence". The loci is the "address" of a group of amino acids - that taken together form a gene encoding.
Georeferenced honeybee sequences? They recorded where each set of bees were captured and typed DNA sequences from each sample.

Nucleotide polymorphism? Strands of DNA are long chains of amino acids Occasionally one amino acid is substituted for the other -- this is the basic random mutation of alleles (genes) driving evolution. A single substitution often has no discernible impact on gene function -- but modern DNA techniques can discover and track these changes. The "polymorphism" means a population has several forms existing simultaneously -- and the inheritance of a single bee can be tracked based on the single substitution of one amino for another in the multi-million amino acid haystack.


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## clyderoad (Jun 10, 2012)

Nice JWChesnut, darn nice.
Thank you.


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## agastache (Jun 27, 2013)

just one correction: DNA is not made of amino acids. DNA consists of nucleotides, of which there are commonly considered to be four--A, C, G, and T. amino acids are what make up proteins, and there are commonly 20 different ones.


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## aunt betty (May 4, 2015)

Thanks for defining them concepts. 
Hopefully the AHB's don't make it to the land of ice.


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