Molecular confirmation of a fourth lineage in honeybees from the Near East

Abstract

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 75 honeybee colonies from the Lebanon was characterized by DraI restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) of the COI-COII intergenic region. The seven observed haplotypes were different enough from all haplotypes already known in Apis mellifera to justify their assignment to a fourth mtDNA lineage. The nucleotide sequence of a 380 base pair (bp) fragment of the NADH2 gene was determined for two haplotypes, which showed a high similarity with two published sequences from A. m. lamarkii and A. m. meda. A microsatellite analysis of a large Lebanese population sample (50 colonies, 8 loci) suggests that Near East populations are also differentiated at the nuclear level from the three previously characterized evolutionary branches of the species A. mellifera.