Africanized honey bees can exhibit highly aggressive behavior and at times attacks have resulted in human deaths. Since 1994, the Africanized honey bee has continued to invade northward in California and east as far as Florida. The Africanized honey bee reached Mexico by 1985, Texas by 1990 and California by 1994. Africanized bees have since spread throughout much of the Western hemisphere, and the advance of African genes both north and south from the introduction site has become one of the most-studied cases in the hybridization literature (reviewed in ). The resulting hybrid offspring are known as "Africanized" honey bees. Swarms soon escaped containment and began to hybridize with European honey bees. The honey bee subspecies Apis mellifera scutellata, was introduced from southern Africa to Brazil in 1956 in an effort to breed honey bees better suited to the Neotropics. Future censuses can determine whether the current range of the Africanized form is stable, patterns of introgression at nuclear loci, and the environmental factors that may limit the northern range of the Africanized honey bee. The utility of this marker was confirmed using 401 georeferenced honey bee sequences from the worldwide Barcode of Life Database. We also found a single nucleotide polymorphism at the DNA barcode locus COI that distinguishes European and African mitotypes. Seventy percent of feral hives, but only 13% of managed hives, sampled in San Diego County carried the African mitotype indicating that a large fraction of foraging workers in both urban and rural San Diego County are feral. There was no correlation between mitotype and morphology in San Diego County suggesting Africanized bees result from bidirectional hybridization. In San Diego County, 65% of foraging honey bee workers carry African mitochondria and the estimated percentage of Africanized workers using morphological measurements is similar (61%). The northernmost African mitotypes detected were approximately 40 km south of Sacramento in California’s central valley. We used mitochondrial markers and morphometric analyses to determine the prevalence of Africanized honeybees in San Diego County and their current northward progress in California west of the Sierra Nevada crest. Africanized honey bees entered California in 1994 but few accounts of their northward expansion or their frequency relative to European honey bees have been published.
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