ABSTRACT Unmanaged, or feral, honey bees can be abundant in Australian agricultural landscapes and provide substantial, but unquantified, crop pollination services. This makes these production systems vulnerable to ecological disturbances. Quantifying the densities of feral honey bees is key to determining the reliance of free pollination services and system vulnerability. Current methods for estimating densities of feral honey bee hives are based on the number of haplotypes identified from drones caught using a pheromone lure. This method assumes that all hives contribute to the drone population, and that the area over which they are attracted is known. To test these assumptions the estimates based on drone capture should be compared to the genetic composition of hives in the same area. We developed a flag and pole method to sample worker sting DNA from feral hives in trees. We show that the use of alarm pheromone isopentyl acetate can significantly increase the efficiency of this method. We also demonstrate that the DNA collected from sting samples will amplify via PCR to a band intensity similar to that of leg tissue. In addition to providing a method to verify hive density estimates based on drone captures other applications of our method are discussed.

中文翻译：

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一种从树上野生蜜蜂蜂箱中采集 DNA 的新方法

摘要 未经管理或野生的蜜蜂在澳大利亚农业景观中可能很丰富，并提供大量但未量化的作物授粉服务。这使得这些生产系统容易受到生态干扰。量化野生蜜蜂的密度是确定是否依赖免费授粉服务和系统脆弱性的关键。目前估计野生蜜蜂蜂箱密度的方法是基于从使用信息素诱饵捕获的雄蜂中识别出的单倍型数量。该方法假设所有蜂巢都对无人机种群有贡献，并且它们被吸引的区域是已知的。为了检验这些假设，应将基于无人机捕获的估计值与同一地区蜂巢的基因组成进行比较。我们开发了一种旗杆法来从树上的野生蜂箱中采集工蜂刺 DNA。我们表明使用警报信息素醋酸异戊酯可以显着提高该方法的效率。我们还证明，从刺痛样本中收集的 DNA 将通过 PCR 扩增到类似于腿部组织的条带强度。除了提供一种基于无人机捕获来验证蜂巢密度估计的方法之外，我们还讨论了我们方法的其他应用。