>The DrawWing software mentioned in one of the articles may be found at the 
>following link but sadly it is only for Windows users. (yes, not 
>withstanding your reservations)
http://www.drawwing.org/

>However...  what I was really wondering is whether there is any way that a 
>bee keeper can identify the subspecies he has?  I know it is not the end of 
>the earth to know but it might be an interesting exercise to find out.

We have been using wing morphometry for years in our selection process.  We 
originally used CBeeWing, but moved to DrawWing in order to automate the 
placing of the landmarks.  There were some bugs in the earlier versions of 
DrawWing; these were corrected after correspondence with Adam Tofilski (who 
wrote DrawWing), although it still consistently places landmarks 0, 3, and 5 
just a little off their correct positions and occasionally misplaces 18. 
For this reason we now recommend using it in Step-by-step mode so that any 
errors can be corrected - it is very quick and easy to do.

I have also put together an Excel spreadsheet (MorphPlot) that will take the 
raw results from DrawWing and produce scattergrams and distribution charts. 
It has full instructions for using DrawWing and MorphPlot on the first 
sheet.  There are links to DrawWing and MorphPlot here:
http://www.stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk/Links.htm#Morphometry
Both programs are available free of charge.

The usefulness of wing morphometry to us is that it gives an indication of 
purity when selecting breeders - we try to get as near to pure A.m.m. as 
possible (two steps forward and one back here in the Midlands - if you are 
lucky ) so are looking for a tight grouping of points in the lower left-hand 
corner of the scattergram.  I am not convinced that a wide scatter of points 
would tell you very much - other than that you had mongrels!  I guess that 
expensive DNA analysis might provide more information, but I am not sure 
that it would have anything other than curiosity value.  Certainly the bees 
that I saw in Thailand were a complete mix as I understand that queens have 
been brought in from many parts of the world.

Best wishes

Peter 

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