Honey bee invaders exploit the genetic resources of their predecessors

In repeated invasions of a new territory, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, can benefit from the genetic endowment of its predecessors. Click here for more information.

“But actually what we found was there was a preference for picking up functional parts of the western European genome over the nonfunctional parts.”

It appeared that the Africanized bees that kept some of the functional western European genes were gaining an advantage, Whitfield said.

“Those African bees are doing better because there were western European honey bees there for them to mix with,” he said. “Now we can say we have a signature for evolution in the genome.”

While the researchers do not yet know how these European honey bee genes are enhancing the survival and fitness of the Africanized bees in the Americas, Whitfield said, it may be that specific traits from western Europe are beneficial, or it may be that being a hybrid is, in and of itself, a good thing for these bees.

In a separate finding, the researchers also discovered a genome-wide signature of evolution associated with the ancient expansion of honey bees from Africa into temperate regions of western and northern Europe. In this expansion, functional parts of the genome have changed more than nonfunctional parts.

Whitfield thinks that these changes may involve social adaptations to survive the hard winters.

“The way the honey bees survive in temperate regions is sort of the way humans do,” Whitfield said. “They have a shelter. They store resources.”

Not needing to survive in such cold weather, African bees store less food and reproduce more.

“So how does an animal that’s basically tropical make it? How does it expand its territory and thrive in very harsh winter conditions in this temperate region?” Whitfield asked. “Humans did it, and Apis mellifera did it in some interestingly parallel ways.”

Whitfield is also an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology.

Editor’s note: To reach Charles Whitfield, call 217-244-2889 ; e-mail: , or

To view or subscribe to the RSS feed for Science News at Illinois, please go to: http://webtools.uiuc.edu/rssManager/608/rss.xml.