It has become increasingly evident that genomic recombination is an evolved trait that varies between and within species. The honey bee has an extremely high genomic recombination rate but the responsible mechanisms have not been studied. Based on the hypothesis that meiotic recombination and DNA damage repair share common mechanisms in honey bees, I predicted that oxidative stress leads to a further increase in recombination rate. This prediction was directly tested by subjecting honey bee queens to oxidative stress by paraquat injection and measuring the rates of genomic recombination in select genome intervals of their offspring before and after injection. Of 27 intervals compared only 13 experienced an increase in the rate of recombination in the post-injection sample set as compared to the pre-injection set, suggesting no significant experimental effect. This result was confirmed when the analysis was restricted to the 16 intervals whose pre-injection recombination fractions were within ±8% of the value that was predicted based on a pre-existing linkage map. Intervals did not see consistent upregulation in all colony sample sets where upregulation occurred either. Overall the evidence does not support the hypothesis that oxidative stress induces an increase in the rate of genomic recombination
