Bob wrote:
> The wing venation test has a margin of operator error (which I reported in
> my ABJ article). The operator has to be very precise when they mouse click
> on the bee part  points for the computer. The Florida lab showed me by
> clicking outside the range that the wing venation program would display
> error. Still a margin of operator error exists. I actually considered the
> process out dated. I would invent a system in which the computer takes a
> picture of both slides ...

You may be interested to know that there is a program which will analyse the 
scanned image of a wing and automatically calculate a number of indices.  It 
was written by Adam Tofilski and is called DrawWing.  I was involved in 
testing the program and wrote a small Excel spreadsheet program  to analyse 
the results and display them in a graphical format.  My primary interest in 
wing morphometry is to determine the racial purity of bees in my A.m.m. 
breeding programme, but I was finding the use of programs that required the 
operator to click on the landmarks (vein junctions) both tedious, 
time-consuming and prone to operator error (a sample of 50 wings requires 
400 clicks).

The spreadsheet can be downloaded from 
http://www.stratfordbeekeepers.homecall.co.uk/MorphPlotV1.7.XLS and the 
first sheet consists of full working instructions and details of where to 
download DrawWing.  Both are simple to use and very fast - the most 
time-consuming part of the operation is collecting the wings and arranging 
them on the scanner bed.

Best wishes

Peter Edwards
beekeepers at stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk
www.stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk/

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