Hi Allen

 > it looks to me as if you are saying that morphometrics is only good 
for comparison and selection within a known population of honey bees. 
If so, by extension, I would see that as suggesting that the technique 
is not well suited to identifying the race of unknown samples of honey bees.

Morphometry can be used for fine detail within a closed population or to 
classify unknown samples into racial groupings, the measurements taken 
will be different for the two purposes, but both approaches are possible.

I have caused some of the confusion as I am normally dealing with 
populations of bees that are already well known and documented as far as 
racial typing is concerned, whereas in USA there are a great many more 
possibilities as to race and sub races.

Morphometry is no 'magic bullet' and should never be the final arbiter 
in decision making.

Because of the very high incidence of crossings among what were never 
'certified pure' stocks in the first place, there is a difficulty 
determining 'race' in US bees, but if sample numbers are high and the 
number of bees within the sample is also high, the first pass of 
morphometric examination, may or may not show clear cut results, but 
this first lot of data would at least show the way to further tests that 
would refine some of the detail.

Any morphometry project is only as good as the database that it is 
founded upon, In Europe we use Ruttner's well established data and still 
argue over some of the fine details, but if you are trying to identify 
something like AHB, you will need a database that has been developed 
from colonies that are known to be AHB by behaviour that can be traced 
back to Kerr's experiment.

I was going to try and apply morphometry to the feral bee stocks that 
have been mentioned a lot lately, but I fell at the first hurdle... 
There is nothing specific to bees that are living in the wild (feral), 
simply because bees are well able to survive without beekeeper 
intervention and being 'in the wild' is nothing special. I think that 
all the measuring would show is that such stocks tend towards an average 
or lowest common denominator.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
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