Time of drone flight in four honey bee species in south-eastern Thailand

Apis dorsata drone flights, collection of semen from everted endophalli and instrumental insemination of queens

“…Drone flights were observed over 9 days (Koeniger and Wijayagunasekera, 1976); 2 days (Koeniger et al, 1988), 4 days (Rinderer et al, 1993); 5 days (Tan et al, 1999) or 10 days (Koeniger et al, 1994). We observed drone flights over 2 months, which enabled us to detect changes in the start of drone flights relative to the progress of the season and increase in daylength.…”

Reproductive isolation among species of the genus Apis

“…This holds true for allopatric A. mellifera in Africa and Europe [74], and for populations of sympatric Asian species. Accordingly, in Sri Lanka [39], in Thailand [67] and in Borneo [44] all sympatric Apis species produced drones simultaneously. We assume, because of the uniform mode of colony multiplication by swarming within the genus, that there is not much 'evolutionary flexibility' to change the reproductive season between sympatric honeybee species.…”

Apis florea: morphometrics, classification and biogeography

“…However, the distinctness of A. florea and A. andreniformis as unequivocal biological species has now been well established based on drone morphology (Ruttner, 1975;Kuang and Li, 1985;Kuang, 1986, 1987;Ruttner, 1988;Wongsiri et al, 1990;Chen, 1993), nest structure (Dung et al, 1996;Rinderer et al, 1996), morphometrics (Rinderer et al, 1995), allozyme polymorphism (Nunamaker et al, 1984;Li et al, 1986;Gan et al, 1991), mtDNA sequence divergences (Smith, 1991;Nanork et al, 2001;360 H.R. Hepburn et al Takahashi et al, unpublished data), and differences in the timing of mating flights (Rinderer et al, 1993). Several of these differences contribute to complete reproductive isolation between the two species Dung et al, 1996).…”