Actually, I spent some time on this topic yesterday.  At one time, most of the bees of African were considered varieties of adansonii. As late as 1978 it was still in dispute:

It has often been stated that adansonii is distributed from the Sahara in the north to the Kalahari and Karroo in the south, but the race was described by Latreille (66a) from a single sample of bees taken from a colony in Senegal and there are differences between it and the bees of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rhodesia, and South Africa, which are more or less uniform among themselves. The West African bees have much shorter hairs and shorter wings, but a longer tongue and legs than the others (96). Ruttner therefore is of the opinion that the name adansonii should be restricted to the bees of the West African coast where Latreille collected them and that it would be correct to use the name scutellata [Lepeletier, 1 836 (67a)] for the bees of Central, East, and South Africa. However, until more samples have been examined, he recommends caution in recognizing this name. Accordingly, the name adansonii is retained in this review. 



* By the way, the name adansonii refers to Michel Adanson who described African bees in his 1759 book "Voyage to Senegal":

The same thing happened to me at Podor in November and December. It is very likely, that during those three months the swarms quit their old hives to build new ones : for at that time, you frequently meet with very considerable heaps of them. One day I saw the roof of a house, the surface of which was sixteen square feet covered with a lay or bed, four fingers thick, of bees heaped up in this manner. This is an evident proof of the prodigious number of those insects. They lodge every where, but more particularly in the trunks of trees made hollow by time. This year they had three hives at our settlement at Podor ; one between the shutters and the window of the room on the first floor : the other on the ground floor, in a small press full of old iron, a leaf of which was opened every day ; and it stood at the bottom of a very dark warehouse : the third was in the ceiling of another warehouse, just behind the door. With difficulty could we drive away those insects, even in the night and with the help of fire : they know how to distinguish in the dark those who molest them, and they show their revenge by most pungent stings.  

These bees differ from those of Europe only in size. There is this singularity in their honey, that it never acquires a consistency like ours; but is always liquid and like a brown syrup. We may affirm, it is infinitely superior, both in delicacy and taste, to the best honey collected in the southern parts of France. 



* Midway between these two descriptions is this from 1862:

Thus in Algiers and Tangier, situated only about three hundred miles to the north of Egypt, there occurs a Bee perfectly identical in colour, hair, and size with that inhabiting North Germany; whilst in Egypt the form which is most distinguished from all others (Apis fasciata, Latr.) by its smaller size and light colour occurs, and apparently remains very constant in its characters. A form agreeing with the Egyptian in size and body-colouring, but differing in its darker hair, appears to be spread over the greater part of Central and Southern Africa, extending on the east coast from Abyssinia, through Mozambique and Caffraria, to the Cape of Good Hope, and occurring also on the west coast at the Senegal (Apis Adansonii, Lat.). It is very remarkable that at the Cape, together with this variegated form, all transitions to a nearly uniform dark one occur: the latter differ from the North German Bees only in smaller size — a peculiarity appertaining more or less to all the African Bees, with the exception of the Algerian. 

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