Hi Dee & All

> and good ID work
> FWIW that is repeatable, lab to lab, country to country.

Identification by morphometry is often considered as too difficult for 
ordinary beekeepers, but in UK and Europe most of this sort of work is 
done by ordinary beekeepers that are prepared to work methodically, 
rather than research organizations.

I have noticed an increase in interest of Morphometric methods recently, 
I believe that this is due to newer computerised methods being more 
widely available (many of the applications can be downloaded and are 
completely free). The methods can be performed manually using a 35 mm 
projector, for computerised working a good quality scanner is required, 
but many top end document scanners with slide scanning are good enough 
for anything except lab work. The rest is learning and understanding the 
process.

Measuring on its own is not enough, we have to record patterns of 
behaviour as well as morphometric data, in order that we may make better 
judgements on our selection of breeding stock.

The upsurge in interest has resulted (in UK, as well as Ireland, at 
least) in a new survey of bees to establish exactly what we already have 
(this is being done by ordinary beekeepers not labs !) perhaps the US 
could do something similar, because standardisation of methods with 
repeatable results country to country, as Dee suggests, would be a 
useful feature.

Standardisation allows comparisons to be made and to this end I would 
like to see all honey bee morphometric and behavioural data kept in a 
centralised fashion so that it can be freely accessed by any individual 
beekeepers. This bank of data would grow progressively and help us all 
to understand our bee's interactions with their environment in more detail.


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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