Allozyme variability in honey bee populations from some mountainous regions in the southwest of Bulgaria

Abstract

SummaryHoney bee populations from different mountainous regions in southwest Bulgaria have been studied on four enzymatic systems (MDH, EST, PGM and HK) corresponding to 4 genetic loci. All loci were found to be polymorphic in almost all populations. The observed heterozygosity ranged from 0.172 to 0.262. Allele frequencies of all loci were used to estimate Nei's (1972) genetic distance, which was found to range between 0.009 and to 0.052 among the populations studied. A Neighbour-Joining phylogenetic tree was obtained by genetic distance matrix methods.This is the first report of allozymic data from honey bee populations from these Bulgarian locations.