Your thesis is intriguing - maybe there is something to that ...
For now, my money would be on our weather: short, sudden mating windows; more willing, cooler flying drones; that kind of thing. Nothing in the way of research to back that up, afaik, but I've heard this kind of thinking expressed many times over the years. Maybe mediterranean drones need an all-over suntan before they'll get off their arses ? It's certainly true of many of the blokes I've met from that part of the world.
LJ
Just stumbled across:
Genetic differentiation and hybridization in the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) in Switzerland. Gabriele Soland-Reckeweg
"Some subspecies are particularly interesting for apiculture and have replaced indigenous subspecies in large parts of their native distribution areas. In Europe, the formerly most widely distributed subspecies used to be the A. m. mellifera, or black honeybee. Its population has declined and became fragmented by introductions of subspecies from south-eastern Europe."
"In the present study, microsatellites were used to assess the impact of sympatric occurrence and conservational breeding programs on the amount of hybridization and to quantify the proportion of dispersers in male honeybees (drones). The results showed that an increased amount of hybridization could be assigned to sympatric occurrence, but nevertheless the last remaining population of the alpine ecotype in the breeding populations is significantly differentiated from the breeding populations of introduced subspecies despite decades of honeybee imports. " (which is pretty-much what you're saying ...)
"Besides the impact of breeding management on the reduction of hybrid proportions, a natural hybridization barrier due to a reduced fitness of male hybrids seems to be involved. " (so this gene conservation phenomenon could well be due to not-up-to-snuff hybrid drones then ?) They miss the sun
Last edited by Little_John; 03-03-2014 at 07:15 PM.
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