# Chocolate Bumble Bee



## crashnt20 (Dec 28, 2006)

Has any one ever heard of a chocolte Bumble Bee, They are really cool looking bumble bee. Instead of being black and yellow they are brown and yellow. Let me know if this is a real species.

Thanks


----------



## joeyo90 (Nov 5, 2006)

i believe it is just a varrient of the leucomelas like the fine spot azureus just line bred for that specific trait

some one correct me if im wrong?


----------



## defaced (May 23, 2005)

They're sometimes sold as Albinos, but there have been great long threads detailing the many ways they're not. They are not a naturally occuring population, but an anomaly produced in captivity then selectively bred to continue it.


----------



## crashnt20 (Dec 28, 2006)

> They're sometimes sold as Albinos, but there have been great long threads detailing the many ways they're not. They are not a naturally occuring population, but an anomaly produced in captivity then selectively bred to continue it.


So i am hopeing that the $100 price tag was a good buy. I thought they looked cool, so i hope it was a good buy. Thanks.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Chocolates are just albino standard leucomelas. They've been selectively bred to have the trait appear on a regular basis. If you think they look cool, then they probably are worth it to you. Just a warning tho, albinos are a rather touchy subject with the PDF community... hybrids and selective breeding are usually the reasons given but its mostly due to the fact that our hobby is not organized to keep pure versions of the original animals and support designer frogs at the same time, so the trend is to generally blacklist designer animals. Animals selectively bred to have a trait appear more often than natural variation int he population allows is considered a designer animal. Not saying its bad, just that there are people who may try and bite your head off for it, so just a heads up.

They are a form of albino, lacking enough melanin to have brown instead of black. The brown is also metallic, showing iridiphores, where the standard phenotype is a flat black. The darker coloration could be pigmentation of the lower skin, or iridiphores acting as the browns... iridiphores are crystal structures rather than flat pigments like xanthophores and melanophores, and while they typically are more well known for doing whites and blues, they can actually do every color...


----------



## crashnt20 (Dec 28, 2006)

Well hopefully no one will get to offended by me having them, i think they are a really cool frog.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Another thing to check... DB has been working hard on providing care sheets for many of the animals in our hobby, leucomelas included.

Check out the leucomelas care sheet here.

Relevant quote for this thread:


> *Standard* - this includes the "orange", "yellow", and "green foot" which are just bloodlines and variation within the morph, and in some cases line breeding has occurred to make these traits more predictable. Also part of this morph is the "Chocolate" selectively bred genetic form (aka "Albino", "Vanishing Jewels").


----------



## crashnt20 (Dec 28, 2006)

I took a look at you webpage an im wondering if you know Dane over at JungleBox.net


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

I made his website lol.


----------



## crashnt20 (Dec 28, 2006)

Thats awesome he is a good guy, i had him build my first frog tank. he does good work for good prices. Real nice guy. Nice website, Impressive, i can only do simple webpages i was out lapped years ago.


----------

