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Incorrect!which would have been easy enough to do as all drones from one queen are genetically the same.
Incorrect!which would have been easy enough to do as all drones from one queen are genetically the same.
OK, so honey bee DNA is recombined more frequently than other animals. That would tend to suggest that a single advantageous mutation spreads more rapidly than it would otherwise because it is more likely to be decoupled from the rest of the genome. To spread rapidly, the new mutation displaces established disadvantaged versions of the gene in a wider range of existing genomes than would otherwise be the case.Genetic 'remix' Key to Evolution of Bee Behavior.,,,
I don't think anything I wrote suggests otherwise. It follows from the researcher's remarks:recombination just means that any particular allele of any single gene may not find itself on the same chromosome in a gamete (sperm or egg; or just egg in honeybees) wrt parent genome...
If recombination is at a higher rate than elsewhere, then a novel mutation would be tried in a greater variety of parent genomes than it would in other animals. If it confers advantage, that variation will be reproduced more than other variations. Genetics textbook stuff."The honey bee has the highest rates of recombination in animals – ten times higher than humans. Our study shows that this high degree of genetic shuffling has turned on the evolutionary faucet in parts of the bee genome responsible for orchestrating worker behaviour," says Kent. "This can allow natural selection to increase the fitness of honey bee colonies, which live or die based on how well their workers 'behave'.
Just so, the idea that there could be a reproducible "winning combination" in honey bees is contradicted by the advantage of diversity according to Mattila, Cobey, Delaplane and others.the mixed backgrounds do give more change (chance?) of finding a winning combination than in a stagnant situation.
Not an intended implication. A high recombination rate gets a specific allele appearing alongside others more quickly than it would in other organisms. Applies whether that allele has an advantage or disadvantage alike. A change in advantage would then produce a shift in the proportions of specific allele types in a population. And that shift could be expected to appear in fewer generations than it might in another species. As you said, the "winning combination" appears a little sooner than if the recombination was less rapid.alan - i was questioning your initial statement that seemed to imply that a higher recombination rate means that advantageous genes are more likely to be decoupled.
Abstract
A honey bee queen mates on wing with an average of 12 males and stores their sperm to produce progeny of mixed paternity. The degree of a queen’s polyandry is positively associated with measures of her colony’s fitness, and observed distributions of mating number are evolutionary optima balancing risks of mating flights against benefits to the colony. Effective mating numbers as high as 40 have been documented, begging the question of the upper bounds of this behavior that can be expected to confer colony benefit. In this study we used instrumental insemination to create three classes of queens with exaggerated range of polyandry– 15, 30, or 60 drones. Colonies headed by queens inseminated with 30 or 60 drones produced more brood per bee and had a lower proportion of samples positive for Varroa destructor mites than colonies whose queens were inseminated with 15 drones, suggesting benefits of polyandry at rates higher than those normally obtaining in nature. Our results are consistent with two hypotheses that posit conditions that reward such high expressions of polyandry: (1) a queen may mate with many males in order to promote beneficial non-additive genetic interactions among subfamilies, and (2) a queen may mate with many males in order to capture a large number of rare alleles that regulate resistance to pathogens and parasites in a breeding population. Our results are unique for identifying the highest levels of polyandry yet detected that confer colony-level benefit and for showing a benefit of polyandry in particular toward the parasitic mite V. destructor.
This newer research belongs in this thread as well.
Interesting results using instrumental insemination.
Honey Bee Colonies Headed by Hyperpolyandrous Queens Have Improved Brood Rearing Efficiency and Lower Infestation Rates of Parasitic Varroa Mites
Published: December 21, 2015
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0142985
Full paper below.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142985
Honey Bee Colonies Headed by Hyperpolyandrous Queens Have Improved Brood Rearing Efficiency and Lower Infestation Rates of Parasitic Varroa Mites
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