This project aims to combine community education with undergraduate student research opportunities by creating a public outreach program. The members of the community will bring in honey bee samples to be tested, for free, for their level of Africanization. An undergraduate research curriculum with the goal of increasing inclusion in education by offering a component for in person as well as online students will be developed from this assay. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are a species of pollinators that are not native to the Americas, but are used extensively in the agricultural industry. Initially, European subspecies of honey bees were brought to the Americas, then researchers brought African subspecies to Brazil to hybridize with the European subspecies under the hypothesis that the hybrid created would be more favorable to the agricultural industry. Since this hybridization has occurred (now called Africanization), the hybrids have been considered to be more aggressive, swarm more frequently, and in some cases, are deadly. The test that will be used for this project is the DraI restriction digestion test of the COI-COII intergenic region in the mitochondrial genome. This simple testing method allows the assay to be more cost effective than standard genotyping methods. The first step of this project is to verify the accuracy of this genetic test in the population of honey bees in the Phoenix metropolitan area. This will require restriction digestion analysis, phenotypic analysis, genetic sequencing, and statistical analysis. Once verified, it will be used for the programs detailed above.
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