Obtaining morphometric standards of drone wings of separate populations of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in Ukraine

Abstract

Today, there are no systematic studies on the wing phenotypes of drone populations of the honeybee widespread in Ukraine. Considering that drone genomes are haploid, this allows one to establish the correspondence between the phenotype and the drone genome, thereby roughly determining the queen's genome in the part responsible for the wing phenotype. This partially compensates for the lack of resources among domestic scientists to conduct genetic research on bees. The aim of the study was to examine the wings of drones from several apiaries in the Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, and Zhytomyr regions, identify typical phenotypes, and attempt their taxonomic identification. Using discriminant analysis, 4640 drone wings were classified into three clusters. A two-step scheme for forming significantly different phenotype clusters of wings was proposed. Initially, based on the similarity of Euclidean distances and Mahalanobis distances (<2.6) between clusters, three groups were obtained, which, for refinement, underwent a second classification. As a result, average values and confidence intervals of eight morphometric traits were established: Ci, Dbi, Disc.sh, Pci, Ri, Ci.3, Ci.2.1, Ci.2.2 for the three wing groups. It is suggested to accept the trait values of these groups as reference data: one as a local population of the A. m. carnica subspecies, and the other two as regional standards for Ukrainian bees. Based on the obtained standards, a significant presence of A. m. carnica subspecies bees was established in all studied apiaries, except for the apiary with the status of a breeding ground for Ukrainian steppe bees (Kuzemin village, Sumy region), where such presence is minimal. This fact indicates the need for special measures to reproduce and expand the ranges of existence of local populations of Ukrainian steppe bees. The example of creating local and regional morphometric standards provided in this work is specifically designed to address this issue.