Estrutura genética das populações de abelhas africanizadas (Apis mellifera L.) da Colômbia estimada através de marcadores nucleares e mitocondriais.

Abstract

In 1957 a hybridization process occurred in South America between European and African bees just introduced in the continent. Since the arrival of the Africanized bees to Colombia in 1978 and their total establishment four years later, there have been done few studies about the degree of hybridization between Africanized swarms from Brazil and the resident ones. Allozymic analysis showed that: I) Hk-1 and Mdh-1 allele frequencies in Colombian Apis mellifera samples are very similar to the ones of Brazilian bees; ii) Africanized populations from Colombia have different levels of introgression of African genes into the European genome of the resident bees; iii) these populations are at Hardy-Wienberg equilibrium and the loci are not at linkage disequilibrium, suggesting that the Africanization process of the Colombian bees has been completed probability; iv) the presence of a altitudinal clinal variation suggests an effect of natural selection on Mdh-1 phenotypes. The 16S region of the mitochondrial DNA showed almost exclusively the African pattern of Colombian bees, a result similar to that was found in Brazilian and Uruguayan bees. The increasing frequencies of haplotype A1 (C/A) for the intergenic region CO I CO II of Colombian bees is related to the decrease of the pattern A4 (B/B) during the movement of the Africanized swarms from Brazil to north of the continent. Based on the results for the three regions of the mitochondrial DNA (16S, intergenic region CO I - COII and CO I), a high number of haplotypes was observed, showing the heterogeneous maternal origin of these colonies. These mitochondrial DNA haplotypes are not distributed through a latitudinal or altitudinal clines indicating that the colonies with African mitochondrial DNA is able to explore many different environments in Colombia. Microsatéllite analysis showed the presence of 7 to 12 alleles for the A43 and RJP57-1 loci. The allele sizes varied between 125-150 pb and 400-600pb, respectively. The results of the present work suggest that the bee populations of Colombia are genetically similar to the ones from north Brazil based on the results from nuclear and mitochondrial markers.