What is Meant by Identification? Morphometric
and molecular differences among the 3 lineages of
honey bees are the tools for study of African-derived
and European-derived bees in the New World. These
tools have 2 main applications: identification of African-
derived bees for regulatory and agricultural purposes,
and elucidation of population level patterns of
hybridization and gene flow among populations. As
examples of the former application, it may be necessary
to identify a honey bee swarm found on a ship
entering a U.S. port, or certify that queens produced
by a queen breeder are European-derived. Whether
or not a particular tool or set of tools is applicable to
a problem depends on the level of investigation -- the
population or the individual colony -- and the degree
of precision required.

Although morphometric analysis and assignment to
a defined group provides regulators with a tool for
Africanized honey bee group classification, it is the
population genetic processes involved in their spread
across the Neotropics and into the northern hemisphere
that are of greater interest to biologists.

Identification of African-Derived Bees in the Americas: A Survey of Methods
Author(s): Walter S. Sheppard and Deborah R. Smith
Source: Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 93(2):159-176. 2000.

More recently:

> Honey bees are grouped into five evolutionary lineages: M from northern and western Europe and northern Africa, A from southern and central Africa, C from the northern Mediterranean region and eastern Europe, O from the eastern Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East region, and Y from the east African country of Ethiopia. Honey bee lineages can be distinguished by restriction and sequence analyses of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) region between the cytochrome oxidase subunits I and II genes. Apidologie 40 (2009) 570–576

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