Cuban honey bees: significant differentiation from European honey bees in incomplete isolation

Abstract

Historical antecedents of bee introductions, as well as behavioral aspects of the bees, have allowed assuming that Cuban bees are of European origin, and have remained on that way for approximately 60 years of isolation, even though Latin America and the Caribbean region is practically Africanized. In this work, three bees were collected per apiary from 11 localities distributed throughout Cuba and their mitochondrial (by cytochrome b) and nuclear (STRs A8, A28, A43, A88, and A113) variation was characterized. Except for locus A28 (p < 0.001), none significantly deviates from the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, and as a whole showed the absence of population structure on the island (Fst = 0.045) and low consanguinity (Fis = −0.135). The Cuban population was compared with reference samples of European, Africanized and Brazilian bees and in all cases showed a moderate differentiation with respect to these populations (Fst paired of 0.156, 0.124 and 0.128 with Europe, Brazil and Africa, respectively). Although this differentiation, the population of Cuban bees shows a clear genetic affinity with the European population. Similarly, most of the samples have mitochondrial haplotypes of European origin (80%), while the rest corresponded to African haplotypes. In short, Cuban bees would have a European origin and would have differentiated in isolation, with a low entry of bees of African lineages.

Keywords:

• Cuba
• honey bees
• microsatellites
• mitochondrial DNA
• cytochrome b

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thanks Miguel A. Ramirez, Osvaldo López, Juan C. Pérez and Daniel Zayas for sample collection. Appreciation is also addressed to Dr. Gerogina Espinoza and MSc. Belén Branchiccela for their help with statistical analysis and manuscript revision respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary Figures 1–3 and Tables 1 and 2 are available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2020.1841460).