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]>