Gilly asks: Is the honey bee a domesticated animal? Depends on how you define domestication
Apparently, the answer is simple: humans raise the honey bees, nurture them and make a living from them just like they do for a chicken or a cow, therefore the bee is a farm animal. In terms of utilization for nutritional needs, the bee can be considered the first farm animal: chimpanzees look for bee swarms and use branches and sticks to reach the honey. When we got out of the forest and into the East African savanna the bee became even more important. Historical evidence indicates that honey was an essential food ingredient for our ancient ancestors already in the Pliocene period over 2 million years ago. It is possible that taking care of beehives was the motive for chiseling some of the first tools that our ancestors created and smoke to get rid of the guard bees was one of the first uses that our ancestors made of fire.
For the human ancestors, honey was an essential source of energy available as simple sugars and the combination of the honey with the bee larvae also provided essential proteins, fats and minerals. Cave paintings show honey pouring and climbing ladders to bee hives as well as the use of smoke. This honey gathering, which continues even today among hunters, gathers and all bee honey mentioned in the Bible (most of the references to honey in the Bible are actually silan - date syrup called honey in Arabic) from Samson who finds the swarm of bees in the lion's carcass to Jonathan who finds honey in the field taken from wild bees. The next step: the transition from gathering to agriculture was the construction of artificial beehives as early as 7,000 years ago in Egypt.
But can a bee raised in a man-made hive be considered a domesticated animal? Charles Darwin who devoted quite a few of his writings to the evolution of domesticated animals as comments that the beginning of domestication from a biological point of view is not the appearance of the manger, the trough or the post and the rope if the fence. The fence isolates the animal from its "wild" relatives and allows the breeder to control its reproduction. Only from this stage in which the animal mates only with the one the person has chosen for him, the artificial selection begins and the traits are designed according to the needs of the breeder such as high milk yield, low aggression, fast growth and the like. This is how you get breeds of turkeys that are not even able to mate due to the male's chest size, Chickens that are laying machines Or cows that have a moving udder (barely). Despite the enormous diversity in the number of domesticated breeds of pets and farm animals, it is possible to point out similar characteristics that domestication produces compared to the wild animal: a decrease in genetic diversity, a decrease in brain volume, a decrease in aggression and an increase in the frequency of alleles directed to desirable traits for the breeder. Most domesticated animals will never be able to return to wild life and those that do, such as the Australian dingo or The herd of wild cows in the Golan Heights Forced to go through a reverse selection that returns him to an untamed form.
The genetic aspect of domestication
If we examine domestication from this genetic point of view, we will find that throughout human agricultural history we have succeeded in domesticating, along with mammals, birds, and many fish, only one insect: the silkworm. This insect, known to many as a school toy in a shoebox, began the process of domestication about 7,000 years ago and was genetically separated from the wild population about 3,500 years ago: enough generations to change according to the needs of breeders: the cultivated butterfly produces more silk, grows faster, is more resistant to population density And on the other hand, he lost his camouflage and the ability to fly.
The young queen (who is going to be the trainer of all the workers) reproduces in flight and is polyandrous, meaning that she mates in a typical courtship trip that will include receiving sperm from about 20 males coming from a distance of up to 4 kilometers. These conditions did not allow controlled breeding of the bees to create cultured varieties. Only in the 20s did man learn the secret of artificial insemination in bees: A delicate procedure that requires anesthesia and immobilization of the queen and the introduction of sperm directly into the reproductive system. A genetic examination of the honey bees in the hives shows that the genetic diversity did not decrease but rather increased compared to their free companions. Unlike domestic dogs or cows, it is not possible to differentiate genetically between a bee from a hive and a bee from a wild swarm. The honey bee originated in Africa and migrated north in several waves and created a typical subspecies in the west of the continent and several subspecies in the east. The genetic "bottleneck" of immigration did indeed create low diversity in Europe, but man transferred hives from different regions as far as North America to Australia and New Zealand, so that the bees there carry a more diverse genetic load than the wild species. Unlike most farm animals, the honey bee has no problem living and reproducing in the wild, and until recently there was no barrier to the flow of genes from the wild population to the agricultural beehives. And yet there are biologists who classify the bee as a domesticated animal. According to them, the wild bee is already extinct and the bees in the wild are descendants of domesticated bees, so there is no reason to expect such a genetic difference between a wolf and a dog. In addition, those in favor of the domestication theory point to traits that changed in the transition from nature to the hive: a decrease in aggression, an increase in honey production and the creation of several queens in the same hive. It is possible that the distinction between wild and domesticated is not sharp, but rather a sequence of changes between a wild animal through animals that man cultivates without taking them out of their natural environment, such as birds of prey that man provides nesting boxes in the fields to fight rodents, animals for which man creates a completely controlled environment to animals that man intentionally cultivates Desirable traits through reproductive control At the end of the sequence are the laboratory animals such as the fruit fly (Drosophila) in which human control reaches the level of the genetic sequence. Bees live in almost every environment where humans live and their degree of domestication varies from wild swarms from which humans steal honey to beehives where the queen is artificially fertilized and it is possible that the answer to the question "is the bee domesticated" will change in the near future.
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More of the topic in Hayadan:
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Why was the bee domesticated?
Very interesting article!
1. The queen bee mates in the air with males from all over the region, so to date, mucous cultivation of bee species has hardly been carried out (there is a little artificial insemination, but it is very negligible)
2. Due to section 1, the bees did not undergo a genetic change that harmed their ability to survive in the wild
3. The beekeeper's main way to change the genetics in the hive is to replace, every year, the queen with a queen of a different species (from a different geographical location). When you stop changing queens there is a genetic drift in favor of the genetics common in the area
The bee is an undomesticated species exploited by man, just as mullet fry caught in the estuaries and raised in fishponds are undomesticated species
The only factor that has changed is that today the bees' ability to survive in the wild has been damaged as a result of the human introduction of the varroa mite, which wipes out any untreated beehive within about two years.