Honeybees, Apis mellifera, have experienced the full impacts of globalisation, including the recent invasion by the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, now one of the main causes of colony losses worldwide. The strong selection pressure it exerts has led some colonies to develop defence strategies conferring some degree of resistance to the parasite. Assuming these traits are partly heritable, selective breeding of naturally resistant bees could be a sustainable strategy for fighting infestations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The Algerian honey bee population is composed of two described subspecies A. m. intermissa and A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEusocial insects are crucial to many ecosystems, and particularly the honeybee (Apis mellifera). One approach to facilitate their study in molecular genetics, is to consider whole-colony genotyping by combining DNA of multiple individuals in a single pool sequencing experiment. Cheap and fast, this technique comes with the drawback of producing data requiring dedicated methods to be fully exploited.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHoney bee subspecies originate from specific geographical areas in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and beekeepers interested in specific phenotypes have imported genetic material to regions outside of the bees' original range for use either in pure lines or controlled crosses. Moreover, imported drones are present in the environment and mate naturally with queens from the local subspecies. The resulting admixture complicates population genetics analyses, and population stratification can be a major problem for association studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe honeybee population of the tropical Reunion Island is a genetic admixture of the Apis mellifera unicolor subspecies, originally described in Madagascar, and of European subspecies, mainly A. m. carnica and A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFour main evolutionary lineages of A. mellifera have been described including eastern Europe (C) and western and northern Europe (M). Many apiculturists prefer bees from the C lineage due to their docility and high productivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Owing to the low cost of the high throughput Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology, more and more species have been and will be sequenced. However, de novo assemblies of large eukaryotic genomes thus produced are composed of a large number of contigs and scaffolds of medium to small size, having no chromosomal assignment. Radiation hybrid (RH) mapping is a powerful tool for building whole genome maps and has been used for several animal species, to help assign sequence scaffolds to chromosomes and determining their order.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF