Question about Bumblebees

Hi everyone! Someone sent me an e-mail asking the following and I was not sure the answer, but sure knew where to come to find the answer. Here's the question as posed to me in an e-mail. Thanks in advance!

I see some sites list BumbleBee Ball Python’s, and some list Super Pastel’s. Now I thought they were 2 different morphs. But some sites have detailed information under the morph name. It says bumblebee’s are a super pastel. Made from 2 normal pastel’s. I thought you got super’s from normal pastel’s, lol. Is it the same thing and people just call them differently or are they two different morphs?

Well Kara would be the best one to answer this question but from my limited understanding super pastels come from breeding pastel x pastel if you get lucky lol. Bumblebee's come for pastel x spider from what I understand and Killer Bees come from super pastel x spider. Hopefully I didn't muck that up too badly but if I did someone please correct me.


~~Jo~~

"Super Pastel" is the name for the appearance of a ball python that gets the pastel gene from both parents making it homozygous for pastel. It could be that one or even both of it's parents where super pastels but they both need to be at least regular heterozygous pastels to have the chance to create a super pastel.

Bumblebees are double hets for pastel and spider. At both the spider and the separate pastel locus they have one mutant (pastel or spider respectively) and one of the corresponding normal versions of the same gene. So you know that between the two parents there was at least one copy of each gene and also between the two parents there was at least one normal copy of each gene. Most so far would be from spider X pastel but it would also be possible to create a bumblebee from bumblebee X normal and several other combinations.

The killerbee is homozygous pastel and heterozygous spider. It is basically a super pastel that is also a spider. It must get pastel from each parent so both would have to at least be pastels and at least one would have to also be a spider. Probably most of the few created so far have been from bumblebee X pastel.

In most of these example breedings the cross mentioned doesn't produce 100% of the desired combination. The only way to do that would be with homozygous animals. For example super pastel X super pastel = 100% super pastel and if a killer bee can be homozygous spider then crossed with normal it would produce 100% bumblebee.