Isolated Populations of Honeybees in Australia

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Abstract
Summary Italian bees, living in protected isolation for 90 years on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, still show the typical morphological characters of ligustica bees from Italy. A population of black bees in central Tasmania, introduced from England in 1814, clearly has the characters of this race, whose only unhybridized populations in Europe are now in peripheral areas. In both isolated Australian populations, the only trait that has changed to any extent is wing shape. Neither shows any increase in uniformity. The two isolated populations are to be regarded as gene banks available for future breeding work.