Molecular confirmation of a fourth lineage in honeybees from the Near East

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 75 honeybee colonies from the Lebanon wa s char acterized by DraI restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) of the COI-COII intergenic region. The seven observed haplotypes were differe nt enough from all haplotypes already known in Apis mellifera to justify th eir assignment to a fourth mtDNA lineage. The nucleotide sequence of a 380 base pair (bp) fragment of the NADH2 gene was determined for two haplotypes , which showed a high similarity with two published sequences from A. m. la markii and A. m. meda. A microsatellite analysis of a large Lebanese popula tion sample (50 colonies, 8 loci) suggests that Near East populations are a lso differentiated at the nuclear level from the three previously character ized evolutionary branches of the species A. mellifera.