Quote Originally Posted by Jon View Post
Getting back to inbreeding, I may be mistaken but I think you may be confusing a general reduction in genetic material with the specific inbreeding problem which can be caused by a reduced number of alleles at the csd locus.
That is certainly the impression given in the scanned article in Scottish beekeeper at the start of the thread where you mention 160 alleles being lost over a number of generations.
Jon, I think that Eric's confusion here was that he thought that 16 alleles of csd might exist in one colony, and that 10 colonies would therefore have 160 alleles. Patent nonsense of course. It is the entire population of bees in a region that might have 16 or 19 or 20 csd alleles. Unless I misunderstood you Eric?

Gavin

PS Grammar, syntax and various items of editorial pedantry including spelling are of course optional on a forum like this, but I've just italicised the gene name as is the convention. Hope that you like it.