Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A morphometric analysis of Apis cerana F and Apis nigrocincta Smith populations from Southeast Asia

1997; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 28; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1051/apido

1297-9678

Martin Damus, Gard W. Otis,

Plant and animal studies

— Apis cerana F and Apis nigrocincta Smith, two species of Asian cavity nesting honey bees, were analyzed for interpopulation morphological variation using conventional morphometric techniques.The well-known honey bee subspecies Apis cerana cerana and A c japonica are confirmed as being distinct from the rest of A cerana, even though the analysis removed the confounding influ- ence of 'overall size' from the data set.There are at least three other morphologically distinct groups: one ranging from Sri Lanka through to Flores and central Sulawesi, a second group so far only found in southern Sulawesi, and a group from Timor.A large phenetic shift has occurred in the second Sulawesi group, indicating that it may have evolved in isolation for a long period of time, or under- gone rapid divergence following a more recent bottleneck event.A nigrocincta is shown to be pre- sent over most of western Sulawesi, on Mindanao and on Sangihe, a small island between Min- danao and Sulawesi.The Mindanao and Sulawesi forms are distinct, but the small sample size did not allow for subspecific recognition.Bees from Luzon, previously identified as A c philippina, are shown to be very distinct from both A cerana and A nigrocincta, and the possibility of their belonging to the species A nigrocincta is discussed.