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Sat, 2 Mar 2002 14:02:52 -0500 |
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Dee wrote:
>This is very good information to know Peter about the dark bee of
>Europe. Is this also true with other dark bee races of Europe and
>Elsewhere (Africa) i.e. Punic, Monticola, Cape Bee even? How does
>this relate to yellow race/strain types also, i.e. Italian, cyprian,
>Egyptian, and Scuts?
Anyone interested in the various types of honey bees owes it to
himself or herself to read Friedrich Ruttner's book "Biogeography and
Taxonomy of Honeybees," 1988.
In the intro he says:
>Honeybees are as small as flies or as large as hornets ... they
>survive for 7 months of winter and even longer periods of drought
>and heat. This book attempts to achieve a synopsis of all available
>morphometric, behavioral, and ecological data of the known
>geographic variants of Apis mellifera. For more than 25 years
>samples were systematically collected and analyzed ... Finally, data
>from more than 1200 samples ... were available for statistical
>analysis. ... Size of the brood cells is another parameter of worker
>and drone size.
Table 4.2
race origin cell diameter (mm)
worker drone
litorea Tanzania 4.62 6.15
yemenitica Oman 4.75 6.2
scutellata Tanzania 4.7
monitcola Tanzania 4.8
"Africanized" S. America 5.0
ligustica central Italy 5.27
mellifera NW Italy 5.37
carnica NE Italy 5.51 6.91
* Note the correlation between worker size and drone size.
--
Peter Borst <[log in to unmask]>
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