![]() ![]() “Bees from beekeepers are largely European.” ![]() “Most of the bees you encounter in San Diego are from feral colonies, not managed hives,” said Kohn. In the bees they collected in San Diego, they also discovered that more than 60 percent of foraging honey bee workers have Africanized genetic traits, but that African traits are found in only 13 percent of managed or commercial hives. They found Africanized genetic traits in honey bees as far north as 40 kilometers south of Sacramento in the state’s central valley. He and his graduate student Yoshiaki Kono sought to determine how far and how fast the northward expansion of Africanized bees was occurring in California by examining the genetic markers of 265 honey bees they collected at 91 sites throughout the state. ![]() Kohn said that while the southern range of the bees has stabilized in Argentina, the northward expansion is still ongoing. Their aggressive behavior and tendency to swarm victims have led them to be dubbed “killer bees.” After the initial wave of hybridization, the remaining bees have a mixture of African and European genes, with the majority of the genome from Africa.”Īfricanized bees are hybrids of a subspecies from southern Africa that were brought to Brazil to improve honey production, but escaped and spread throughout South America and Central America, arriving in Mexico in 1985 and Texas in 1990. “The pattern of Africanization we documented in San Diego County and elsewhere in California appears consistent with patterns previously documented in Texas, where Africanized honey bees first appeared in the United States. “Our study shows that the large majority of bees one encounters in San Diego County are Africanized and that most of the bees you encounter are from feral colonies, not managed hives,” said Joshua Kohn, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the study. The study, published in this week’s edition of the journal PLOS One, found that more than 60 percent of the foraging honey bees in San Diego County are Africanized and that Africanized bees can now be found as far north as California’s delta region. A study conducted by biologists at UC San Diego has found that the Africanized honey bee-an aggressive hybrid of the European honey bee-is continuing to expand its range northward since its introduction into Southern California in 1994. ![]()
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