Ancestral geographic range reconstruction suggests a likely origin of bees in the southern hemisphere, with Melittidae ancestrally located within Africa, and Halictidae, Colletidae, and Apidae within the New World.
Recently, next-generation sequencing was used to characterize the botanical origins of bee-collected pollen using the ribosomal intergenic ITS2 locus (Richardson et al., 2015).
Splicing and banding patterns of the resultant amplified PCR product determined the maternal origin of the bees as either West European (subspecies including Apis mellifera mellifera), East European (subspecies including A. m. ligustica), North African (A. m. lamarkii), or South African (A. m. scutellata) after they were electrophoresed on 1.5% agarose gels and visualized with ethidium bromide.
The numbers 98, 120 and 231 indicate the colony origin of the bees.
After one day of acclimation to the lab, we removed the queen from two randomly selected colonies, and within two hours introduced 12 callow bees (from a mixed origin pool of bees that emerged during the previous 24 hours) into each colony.
Furthermore no effect of colony of origin and bee body weight on mortality was found (GLM, treatments: F = 1.1, df = 1, P = 0.29; Colony F = 0.46, df = 2, P = 0.63; body weight: F = 0.19, df = 1, P = 0.66).
On the basis of these considerations, it can be stated that in order to identify trends in the relationship between the composition of the samples analyzed and the factors influencing composition (origin, bee strain, season of bee venom collection), all the data should be subjected to chemometric analysis (PCA, ANOVA).
This study shifts the oldest angiosperms back farther in time towards the origin of groups like bees and flies, the scientists say.
GLMM analysis revealed significant main effects of nicotine and time since inoculation on infection intensity, but not colony of origin or bee body weight (Table 1).
