Because of the high demand for queens in Canada during the spring, many are sourced from offshore sites, particularly from the tropics www.selleckchem.com/products/ganetespib-sta-9090.html (e.g., Hawaii) or the southern hemisphere (e.g., New Zealand, Chile). This importation of bees is currently necessary but not optimal as the bees may not perform as well as locally raised bees [21]). Queen breeders endeavour to select and to maintain economically desirable phenotypes (e.g., high honey production, disease resistance, winter survival, gentleness) in their populations, nevertheless when bees are sold abroad the fidelity of these characteristics is not necessarily maintained. Through proteomic analysis of honey bee populations from several geographically distinct regions, our data indicates that optimized metabolic capacities for various climatic regions have developed, potentially conferring beneficial phenotypic characteristics.
It is worth noting that the adaptation of the queens to their original breeding site was maintained after being moved to an experimental location in Alberta where their colonies were sampled. These local adaptations observed as differences in protein levels may be related to genetic or epigenetic changes in the queens of the different populations. Our null hypothesis stated that no differences should exist among the protein expression profiles of different populations of honey bees; the basis for this being that queen production for North America is centralized in a few locations. The data presented here argue strongly in favor of rejecting this null hypothesis: a) At the individual protein level there are at least 172 proteins whose expression in the midgut correlates with population (Fig.
2, Fig. 4). b) At the level of the whole protein expression profile, populations from similar climates tended very strongly to be more similar to one another (Fig. 3). c) At the functional level, the expression levels of whole classes of proteins tended to be co-regulated (Fig. 5, Table 3). We are cognizant, however, that the choice of colonies used in these analyses did not permit random selection from a large cohort representing each population, due to constraints brought upon by practical considerations associated with importation and maintenance of stock. These data nonetheless are highly suggestive of intriguing local adaptations occurring in honey bee metabolism. The populations studied here may represent separate geographical ecotypes, where metabolic control and protein synthesis/folding mechanisms has been finely tuned to confer fitness to local environmental pressures such as climate, food resources, predation and diseases. In general, such processes are non-random series of genetic events where allelic frequencies alter with a direct influence GSK-3 on the phenotype.
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