Abstract
Simple SummaryThe necessity of protecting the Dark European honey bee (Apis m. mellifera) in Poland was realized in the 1970s. This was a consequence of the displacement of native bees caused mainly by the mass importation of queen bees of foreign species. Today, we have four programs for the conservation of the following lines of our Dark European honey bee: Augustow M, Kampinos M, Asta M and Northern M. These programs aim to keep the bee gene pool as rich as possible and to preserve the phenotypic and behavioral features characteristic of the Apis m. mellifera species. The aim of this study was to investigate the diversification of morphological features of the Dark European honey bee of the Augustow M line. The authors have demonstrated that the morphological features of the Augustow M line—crucial for identifying the species affiliation, determined as part of the authors’ research—are consistent with the corresponding features described by relevant Polish references used for the conservation of native bee lines.The aim of this study was to investigate the diversification of morphological features of the Dark European honey bee of the Augustow M line. The authors studied the proboscis length and cubital index, as features determining the affiliation to the species; the width of tergite 4 and the sum of widths of tergites 3 + 4, as indicators of the bee body size; and the length and width of the right forewing. They compared bees sampled from (1) the “lead apiary”, (2) “associate apiaries” and (3) “conservation area apiaries”—apiaries situated in the conservation area established by the national program for the conservation of genetic resources of this bee line. The conclusion was that it is possible to protect bees of the Augustow M line under the existing program, based on resources available to the lead, associate and conservation area apiaries. The bees studied have the essential features of the Dark European honey bee and the values of parameters tested are consistent with the morphological feature references valid for Apis m. mellifera. On the other hand, based on the authors’ research and on other studies described in literature of 1960s, there is a dwarfing trend in the Dark European honey bee of the Augustow M line.
Highlights
The work to describe European bee populations and their diversity more thoroughly was inspired by the research of Alpatov [1,2,3,4] and Goetze [5]
The wing length, wing form factor and glossa length of the Dark European honey bee correlation coefficients were computed for the examination of relations between the seven morphological features of the Dark European honey bee of the Augustow M line
Bees of the Augustow M line have the features of the Dark European honey bee
Summary
The work to describe European bee populations and their diversity more thoroughly was inspired by the research of Alpatov [1,2,3,4] and Goetze [5]. Sophisticated statistical analyses of these morphological features carried out by further researchers in 1975 to 1986 made it possible to distinguish the Apis mellifera subspecies and to locate their habitats [7,8,9,10]. Mellifera, while a population more related to forest bees Morphometric studies have identified four distinct populations of Dark European honey bee living in Poland. [12,13] These factors have indirectly contributed to a sharp drop in honey bee populations, including the middle-European bee. The area of Poland inhabited by the Dark European honey bee has shrank over the recent decades to a few spots located in the north-eastern and central parts of the country where the insects are kept under protection. The distribution and extent of the presence of the Dark European honey bee in Poland have been described in detail by Bornus et al [11] and by Ruttner [14,15,16]
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