Disentangling environmental influence on wing size and shape in Partamona helleri across the Atlantic forest

Abstract

Partamona helleri is a stingless bee distributed across the Atlantic Forest, one of Brazil's most threatened biomes. We analyzed wing size and shape in 26 populations spanning the species' latitudinal range to evaluate their associations with environmental variables. Among the variables examined, mean and minimum temperatures explained the largest proportion of wing size variation (13.5% and 9.5%, respectively), whereas rainfall and relative humidity accounted for 2.05% and 2.39% of the total wing shape variation. However, colony and locality explained substantially larger proportions of the total phenotypic variance than the fixed environmental effects, accounting on average for approximately 40% and 38% of centroid size variation, respectively, and 48% and 18% of wing shape variation, respectively. These findings indicate that wing morphology in P. helleri is shaped by both environmental conditions and population-level factors.