Monday, December 10, 2007
D0090

Directional asymmetry in gentle Africanized bees on an island

Jason Trinidad-Pérez, checon@mail.com, Bert Rivera-Marchand, brivera@bc.inter.edu, and Rafael R. Canales-Patrana, rrcanales@bc.inter.edu. Inter American University of Puerto Rico, 500 John Will Harris Rd, Bayamón, PR

Africanized honey bees, arrived to the island of Puerto Rico in 1994. Recent studies have determined that the feral population of honey bees of the island is Africanized by maternal descent with introgression of European alleles in their nuclear DNA. These bees have retained typical Africanized traits such as Varroa mite resistance and overall wing length. However they have been found to have reduced defensive behavior when compared to Africanized bees of the mainland; behaving more like gentle European bees. Nevertheless, with the high introgression of European alleles we wished to evaluate the possibility of directional and fluctuating asymmetry in the population. We examined eight different feral Africanized hives represented by 34 bees and one Italian hive was included as a control group. Wings were digitalized and analyzed with software we developed in C++ language, which will soon become a freeware available on the internet. We found directional asymmetry in the sampled population of Africanized bees yet, could not detect fluctuating asymmetry. This data suggest a possible effect of the genetic introgression on the directional asymmetry of the wings of Africanized bees on the island.


Species 1: Hymenoptera Apidae Apis mellifera (honey bee)