Here's what I believe according to the evidence I have gathered: The number of colonies is so great, and the amount of genetic information is so great that the chance of losing any given piece of information with the death of any given hive is miniscule or functionally impossible. That's what I believe according to the evidence I have seen, but I am always open to new evidence or interpretations of the evidence.
If one looks at the concept of Founder Effect and more generally Island
Biogeography in biology and evolutionary biology, one may see the same
questions asked and answered or at least theories proposed to answer the
questions raised in a "Bond" or "Live and Let Die" scenario of selection
pressure.
A salient point in honey bee heredity is sex determination. Honey bees'
sexual heredity is allelic, not chromosomal (XX vs XY) as in vertebrates.
Thus, one may find their population limited by a homogeneous expression in
the sex allele area, causing poor brood pattern and general decline.
This inherit mechanism forces drone promiscuity to be positive, and forces
small populations of isolated bees to retain a specific size necessary to allow the sex
allele expression to remain diverse enough to keep the general population
viable.
Physiologically, a small, isolated honey bee population will go extinct after X
number of generations due to the inherint homogeniety that will occur
in sex allele inheritance.
One could say that drones fly and virgins fly, each to mate, to increase
the chances of heterozygosity in sex allele expression by mating with
others that have different sex allele expressions.
BOND or Live and Let Die would encourage the rapid sex allele
homogeneity, if the population became to small. The Paige-Laidlaw model for
breeding in a closed population addresses this somewhat, but folks who use
this model still bring in new breeders now and then, injecting new genotypic
combinations where specifically, sex determination, needs to be made more
heterozygus: more diverse. You get the idea.
If one has a small, highly controlled breeding population, one will indeed
need to create an artificial gene flow by bringing in new blood, or one will
lose all. If one has a small breeding population and one is open-mating, then one is
usually okay with the way the gene flow occurs.
Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com