Dave Hamilton wrote:

> We had Mr. Jackson from the Texas inspection program do a session at the
> Nebraska
> Master Beekeepers in which they mounted wings on glass sides, enlarged them via
> a slide projector and measured wing veins (morphometrics) to quickly decide if
> EHB or AHB

What you describe is the simplest form of F.A.B.I.S. (FAST Africanized Bee
Identification System), which was not designed to give rock-solid identifications of
samples, but to separate out the shorter wing-length samples, which TEND to be the
africanized colonies. It was originally meant to take the crushing load of bee
samples off the bee forensic labs, and worked o.k. up to a point. Samples of bees
which fail the test (by being shorter) are sent for full 25-character USDAID/Daly
morphometrics, which can take 4-8 hours per 10-bee sample.   FABIS tends to miss
longer-winged ahb samples (which DO exist). Many people have suggested it should
have been named FEBIS, for European identification. The State of Arizona, when using
it to cull out longer-winged bee samples, set the break-over point at 9.05 mm. I
believe they missed looking at some samples of longer-winged ahb by not setting it
longer, but with several hundred samples coming in, it helped. Do not rely on FABIS
for regulatory work.
-----------------------------------------------------------
John F. Edwards
Biological Lab. Technician
"Feral Bee Tracker and AHB Identifier"
Carl Hayden Bee Research Center
Agricultural Research Service - USDA
http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/home/edwards/edwards.html