Robert Brenchley wrote:

>
>  We're being told that AHB and EHB may not
> hybridise effectively, even that they may be separate species. That implies
> that there should be clear differences between bees that, after all,
> originate from several thousand miles apart. Yet we're also told that the two
> are 'difficult' to tell apart, that it's a specialist job to distinguish
> them. I've tried to find out exactly how you distinguish them
> morphometrically, and had no real success. These two data appear to be
> contradictory.
>

Try reading Daly and Balling, 1978, (Proc. Kansas....... I forget the rest of the
citation- sorry)

>
>     How can bees originating from two distinct, unconnected populations,
> which have developed over, I would imagine, millions of years, without
> interbreeding, in very different environments, and which remain genetically
> distinct, be so hard to tell apart?

It is just as easy to separate wild dogs and hounds.  It can be done with the
proper measurements and weighted probabilities. All it requires is a large number
of (verified, that's the trick) samples from different populations and latitudes,
some measurement skills, and several mathematicians and computer programmers, and
most subspecies of plants or animals can be separated reliably. Dr. Howell Daly's
method, in it's two or three versions and database of over 2,000 10-bee samples,
is still the only method which has a high probability of success.
- John Edwards, former morphometricist and observer of bees