Hi Bob & all

> but in the eyes of the beekeeping world they are
> simply slight variations of the Italian race

Yes, unfortunately there are two types of behaviourist... Lumpers and
splitters...

Lumpers are those that wish to simplify things might say that any strain
that contained a majority of one race or another was just that race.

Splitters are geek like beings that this is not detailed enough for (I'm a
splitter) I take into account scatter and sub peaks in the morphometry data
and the behaviour as recorded in colony records. DNA has arrived too late
for me to take much advantage of it, my days of physically working with bees
are now over, but that does not extinguish the passion that I have for bees
and their habits. But DNA methods have improved and will improve much more
in terms of both usefulness and cost, so expect good progress in future.

I know about the Lusby wing venation variant, but have never been given
enough data from a 50 bee sample, to do any classification or plotting,
without such data the fact that there is an anomaly means nothing. It would
be nice to see where they fit in the multivariate analysis.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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