Türkiye'de Bal Arısı (Apis mellifera L.) Populasyonlarının Ayırt Edilmesi İçin Yeni Morfometrik Yaklaşım

Today, 29 subspecies have been defined, each of which is adapted to a certain set of environmental characteristics, spreading all over the world except Antarctica. Many morphological and morphometric features have been used to classify honey bees from the past to the present. It has been reported that features such as length, angle and indices coming from the front wings are very efficient for classification. In recent studies, various programs have been developed and automatic classification has been attempted through the images of bee wings. This study aimed to determine the naturally occurring honey bee biodiversity in Turkiye by measuring 7 areas (A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7) on the right front wing. For this purpose, a total of 3392 worker bee samples were collected from 143 colonies in 19 provinces of Turkiye. The photographs of the prepared preparations were taken at 1X magnification with the BAB camera system connected to the BAB STR45 stereozoom microscope. The measurements of 7 areas on the right front wings of honey bee populations distributed in Turkiye were made automatically in the BAB Bs200ProP program. Colony averages of the raw data of the area measurements of each province were taken and the results were evaluated with Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) in the SPSS.15 package program. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was applied to separate the groups to determine the variation within and between groups. As a result of this study, the minimum total area was seen in Van at 4.51 and the maximum total area was seen in Ardahan at 5.76. The average size of the measured areas decreased from the north-east to the south of Turkiye. Area measurements on the forewing were found to be a marker for distinguishing Anatolian (A. m. anatoliaca) and Caucasian (A. m. caucasica) honey bees.