While landscape genetics is in its infancy, it is a rapidly growing research field in part owing to the increasing
availability of powerful molecular and analytical tools. By integrating landscape ecology, spatial statistics and
population genetics, landscape genetics is allowing an unprecedented understanding of the microevolutionary
processes shaping genetic variation, which has important implications for the advance of ecological and
evolutionary knowledge. The Iberian honey bee provides a great model system to address evolutionary
questions using a landscape genetics framework. First, previous studies suggest that the Iberian honey bee has
a hybrid origin and hybrid zones have been favored by evolutionary biologists as powerful natural laboratories
to study evolutionary processes. Second, with the publication of the honey bee genome and development of
high‐density SNP markers, powerful tools are now available to dissect the relative importance of neutral and
adaptive forces in shaping the Iberian honey bee hybrid zone, a goal of central importance as it leads to more
robust inferences of demographic history and to identification of adaptive divergence. Herein, we will present
an ongoing research project on the Iberian honey bee hybrid zone where the tools of landscape genetics and
population genomics will be combined to unravel the challenging evolutionary history of the Iberian honey bee.
