The Buzz Newsletter

January 2007

 

 

Page 9

Study: All the World’s
Honeybees Come From Africa

By Sara Goudarzi
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Fox News

You can be stung in Rome, Moscow or Phoenix. But the honeybee is originally from Africa, scientists reported Wednesday.

By looking at variations in genetic markers from 341 bees, researchers found that the common honey bee, Apis mellifera, originated in African and migraged to Europe at least twice.

“The migrations resulted in two European populations that are geographically close, but genetically quite different,” said lead study author Charles Whitfield of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “In fact, the two European populations are more related to honeybees in Africa than to each other.”

The researchers used simple variations in the bee DNA, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), to figure out where the bees came from and what their relationships to one another were.

The researchers compared 1,136 markers, many more than had been available for previous studies. The vast number of markers allowed the scientists to decipher the bees’ genetic information more precisely than ever before.

In a third expansion in the Americas, the European honeybee, introduced around 1622, was replaced by the African killer bee in 1956, the researcher write in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal Science.

“By studying the variation in the honeybee genome, we can not only monitor the movement of these bees, we can also identify the genes that cause the variations – and that will allow us to better understand the differences,” Whitfield said.

 

North American Honeybees Declining
www.sciencenewsblog.com/environment/

The Environment News Service reports that a new study from the National Research Council has found that honeybees and other pollinators are declining in North America. The report sounds a specific warning for the honeybee, which are vital to U.S. agriculture, pollinating more than 90 commercially grown crops. It can take a massive amount of bees to ensure a crop is suitably pollinated.

For example, it takes about 1.4 million colonies of honeybees to pollinate 550,000 acres of almond trees in California.

U.S. honeybee populations have declined at least 30 percent since the 1980s, when a non-native parasitic mite was introduced.

The committee said that the full extent of the decline is unclear because of problems with the way the federal government collects statistics on the beekeeping industry.

Antibiotic-resistant pathogens and encroachment by Africanized honeybees also are hurting North American honeybee levels, the committee said, and there is clear evidence of a honeybee shortage.
The populations of other pollinators like butterflies, bats and hummingbirds are also on the decline.

Posted on November 3, 2006