Conservation and Reintroduction of the Short-Haired Bumblebee (Bombus subterraneus)

Much of the focus of ancient DNA research has traditionally been on vertebrate remains, of hundreds to thousands of years in age, recovered from archaeological and palaeontological burial contexts. However, the bulk of most natural history collections are made up of much more recent specimens, with rather different curation and preservation histories. These specimens present excellent opportunities to resolve evolutionary processes in rare and extinct taxa, but rather little is known about the quality and quantity of DNA in this type of material, which may indeed show the same characteristically high levels of fragmentation and base modification

In this paper, I will focus on the use of archival material in the identification of a braconid parasitoid wasp, which was found to be a major parasite of imported stock during the reintroduction of B. subterraneus to the UK. Due to the restrictions of the quarantine procedure, only parasitoid larvae were available, and it was not possible to morphologically identify these to species level. Here, I will discuss the results of our molecular work, focusing on the nature and quality of DNA which can be recovered from archival entomological material, where DNA preservation is poor, and the volume of starting material is extremely small.