Apis mellifera (Honey bee, DH4) Assembly and Gene Annotation

About Apis mellifera

Apis mellifera, the European (or western) honey bee, is native to western Asia, Europe and Africa, but can now be found all around the world. The size of A. mellifera varies between 10-20mm and depends on their role (worker bees are 10-15mm long, queens 18-20mm and drones 15-17mm). A bee's food intake dictates its future role in the hive, and its life span: workers live 2-4 weeks in the summer or 11 months over the winter, drones 4-8 weeks, and queens 2-5 years.

Apis mellifera is a model species for social behaviour, and has an essential ecological role as a pollinator.

Picture credit (Creative Commons BY-SA 2.5): Andreas Trepte (http://www.photo-natur.de) 2009

Assembly

The Apis mellifera genome was sequenced and assembled by the Matthew Websters research group from the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology of Uppsala University. The HAv3.1 assembly was
imported from GenBank, an is one of the used by the Hymenoptera Genome Database project [3].

Annotation

The annotations in Ensembl Metazoa is the NCBI Apis mellifera Annotation Release 104.

References

1. Insights into social insects from the genome of the honeybee Apis mellifera.
   Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium. 2006. Nature. 443:931-949.
2. A hybrid de novo genome assembly of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, with chromosome-length scaffolds.
   Wallberg A, Bunikis I, Pettersson OV, Mosbech MB, Childers AK, Evans JD, Mikheyev AS, Robertson HM, Robinson GE, Webster MT. 2019. BMC Genomics. 20(1):275.
3. Hymenoptera Genome Database: integrating genome annotations in HymenopteraMine.
   Elsik CG, Tayal A, Diesh CM, Unni DR, Emery ML, Nguyen HN, Hagen DE. 2015. Nucleic Acids Research. 44(D1):D793-800.