Peter.
If you take a sample from the floor and take a sample from the brood nest you will find there is a pretty good correlation.
I have also found that a colony produces a similar scattergram if sampled several times over a period of years irrespective of any seasonal drifting.
For several years now the Bibba magazine has been full of well intentioned articles about the accuracy of sampling techniques, but the elephant in the room is whether there is actually a good correlation between wing pattern and underlying DNA. If not, the arguments about sampling from the floor or from the brood nest are not that relevant.
Cart before the horse.
Wing venation will indicate a hybrid fairly clearly but it may not tell you much about whether the colony tested is pure race especially if you have been sampling wings over a period of years and using that information as part of the selection process. It is quite conceivable that you could get a scattergram with all the points in the correct quadrant which turns out to have mixed genetics.
What does produce very inaccurate results is sampling too soon after a colony has been requeened. Even after 3 months you still have bees from the previous queen present.
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