Department of Animal Science, Hartpury College, Hartpury, GL19 3BE, UK.
State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, and Centre for Excellence in Life and Paleoenvironment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, 210008, China.
Sci Rep. 2020 Sep 3;10(1):14515. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71393-0.
Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) are one of the most important pollinators of agricultural crops and wild plants. Despite the growth in the availability of sequence data for honey bees, the phylogeny of the species remains a subject of controversy. Most notably, the geographic origin of honey bees is uncertain, as are the relationships among its constituent lineages and subspecies. We aim to infer the evolutionary and biogeographical history of the honey bee from mitochondrial genomes. Here we analyse the full mitochondrial genomes of 18 A. mellifera subspecies, belonging to all major lineages, using a range of gene sampling strategies and inference models to identify factors that may have contributed to the recovery of incongruent results in previous studies. Our analyses support a northern African or Middle Eastern origin of A. mellifera. We show that the previously suggested European and Afrotropical cradles of honey bees are the result of phylogenetic error. Monophyly of the M, C, and O lineages is strongly supported, but the A lineage appears paraphyletic. A. mellifera colonised Europe through at least two pathways, across the Strait of Gibraltar and via Asia Minor.
西方蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）是农业作物和野生植物最重要的传粉媒介之一。尽管有关蜜蜂的序列数据越来越多，但该物种的系统发育仍然存在争议。最值得注意的是，蜜蜂的地理起源不确定，其组成谱系和亚种之间的关系也不确定。我们旨在从线粒体基因组推断蜜蜂的进化和生物地理学历史。在这里，我们使用一系列基因采样策略和推断模型来分析属于所有主要谱系的 18 个西方蜜蜂亚种的完整线粒体基因组，以确定哪些因素可能导致先前研究中出现不一致结果。我们的分析支持非洲北部或中东是西方蜜蜂的起源地。我们表明，先前提出的欧洲和非洲热带地区是蜜蜂的发源地，这是系统发育错误的结果。M、C 和 O 谱系的单系性得到了强有力的支持，但 A 谱系似乎是并系的。西方蜜蜂通过至少两种途径殖民欧洲，一种是通过直布罗陀海峡，另一种是通过小亚细亚。
