Morphometric and Genetic Characterization of Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L.) From Thrace Region of Turkey

Abstract

A detailed morphological and genetic characterization of honey bees from the Thrace and west Anatolian regions of Turkey was surveyed. A total of 1650 worker bee samples (110 colonies) were evaluated with the forty-one morphological characters and 217 honey bee samples were analyzed via DNA sequencing of the tRNAleu-cox2 region. In this study, three different populations, Thrace (Tekirdağ, Kırklareli and Edirne provinces), Island Gökçeada, and western Anatolia were formed based on morphometrics, since the Marmara Sea has taken a very strong barrier role in this formation. The morphological similarity of the Thrace population was supported by the genetic analysis. The sequencing of the tRNAleu-cox2 region revealed twenty-two different haplotypes, sixteen of which are novel. The C2d, macedonica-like haplotype, was the most widely found haplotype (48%) all around the Thrace region. Along with the C2d haplotype, previously published C2s, C2v, C2i, C2j, and C2h haplotypes, and the newly found haplotypes were also observed but less frequently. In this study, Thrace honey bees were found to more similar to A. m. macedonica through the mtDNA sequence analysis, whereas carnica-like honey bees were only found near the Istranca mountain ridges, Kırklareli province and macedonica-like honey bees all around the Thrace region. According to our results, some of the Thrace honey bee populations may be both A. m. carnica and A. m. macedonica but the assignment to the latter subspecies seems more likely due to its geographic range.

Genetic Diversity of Kırklareli Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.) Populations in Thrace Region of Turkey: Identification of Mitochondrial COI and ND5 Gene Regions

“…Considering this geography, it was concluded that Anatolian (Apis mellifera anatoliaca Maa, 1953), Caucasian (Apis mellifera caucasica Gorbachev, 1916), Iranian (Apis mellifera meda Skorikov, 1929) and Syrian bees (Apis mellifera syriaca Buttel-Reepen, 1906) were found in Turkey. The existence of the fifth honey bee subspecies in the Thrace region according to morphological (Güler et al, 2010) and genetic marker studies was also reported (Smith et al, 1997;Palmer et al, 2000;Kekeçoğlu et al, 2007Kekeçoğlu et al, , 2009Özdil et al, 2009, 2022Ünal and Özdil, 2018).…”

“…Identification of the morphological and genetic variation in the honey bee subspecies and ecotypes, such as Thrace, Yığılca, Muğla, etc. ecotypes plays an important role in the formation of honey bee populations (Güler et al, 2010;Kekeçoğlu et al, 2007Kekeçoğlu et al, , 2009Özdil et al, 2009, 2022Güder et al, 2017;Gür et al, 2018;Ünal and Özdil, 2018).…”

Conservation of Local Honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) in Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Study for Morphological Characterization and Determination of Colony Performance

“…As a result of that study, old and new bee samples were clustered into two main clusters. It is important to protect honeybee ecotypes and genetic resources in their original regions [ 40 ], especially in order to determine the effects of commercial queen use and migratory beekeeping on the morphological variation [ 41 ]. In this study, besides determining the morphological characteristics of the Adıyaman honeybee, which has not been studied in detail before, the parameters of the colony performance were also investigated.…”

İzole bölgelerde korunan Kafkas arısı, Apis mellifera caucasica Pollmann, 1889 (Hymenoptera: Apidae) popülasyonunda genetik varyasyonun azalıp azalmadığına dair bir çalışma

“…Many molecular markers such as restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analyses have been used in honey bee population genetics studies, but for the last 20 years, microsatellite loci have been quite widely used due to their features such as high polymorphism, multiallelicity, abundance in the genome and easy scorable (Kandemir & Kence, 1995;Smith et al, 1997;Bodur et al, 2007;Kekeçoğlu et al, 2009;Özdil et al, 2009;Liu et al, 2016;Rahimi et al, 2016;Haddad et al, 2018;Hassett et al, 2018;Yu et al, 2019;Özdil et al, 2022). Latterly, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been used in population genetics studies, however, thanks to the advantages provided by microsatellites, they could not get ahead of microsatellites even in the genomic era (Zimmerman et al, 2020;Mukherjee et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022).…”