[dr_dshiv]

> People often comment how quickly escaped managed bees regress to the local wild bees (2-3 years of natural selection weeds out the foreign genes). He is seeing an interesting selection factor: in tree cavities colonised by swarms from conventional hives (yellower bees), the bees build comb differently to the real wild bees. They have been selected, by humans, to build flat sheets – which is not optimal for defence or climate control, and they die off quickly in tree cavities.

[kpgraham]

A beekeeper here.

1. Bees have only been kept in flat frames for less than 200 years which would not be enough time to select for such a specific trait.

2. Domestic bees that swarm and find homes in hollow trees or gaps in houses form blobby swirls of what beekeepers call 'crazy comb'. The liberated bees create topological forms which are probably much more efficient than flat frames. Flat frames benefit the beekeeper, not so much the bees, and bees will make comb when and where they like.

[ByersReason]

I believe this to be an incorrect statement.

Evolution in insects is working on a much tighter time-frame, for example: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-evidence-peppe...

Also there are plenty of "beekeepers" who believe in shorter time frame adaptions, and are providing evolutionary cradles for such, e.g. https://www.apisarborea.org/

And of course many stories with anecdotal evidence from communities of bees in protected watersheds evolving (or perhaps activating prior) varroa mite resistant traits.

[xyzzyz]

200 years is more than enough to select for something, even with natural selection, and especially so for artificial selection. Dog breeders can and did select for many specific traits in the course of single lifetime, for example.

[fredley]

> They have been selected, by humans, to build flat sheets

What? The flat sheets are nothing to do with selection. They are to do with leveraging 'bee space' in the design of hives. Man-made hives include sheets of scaffold at very specific distances to ensure that bees build flat comb. The reason for doing this is easy inspection and management of the hive.

They are constrained to do this by leveraging bee space, it is not an evolved feature of commercial bees.

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/bsp.html

[afandian]

I'm not making any assertions, but don't you think there's some kind of selective process at work when you're breeding bees in an environment with fixed frames? Like, can they sustain a cluster over winter within the parameters?

[vanderZwan]

Surely that would produce selection pressure for favoring bees that naturally follow those constraints over those that ignore them though?

Also, assuming his observations are valid, how else would you explain the differences between wild and commercial bees?

[Lhiw]

Can't you both be right?

They're trained into making flat sheets and then lose the ability or instinct to make non flat sheets?