Your gallery of 2D plots

[Peter]

Bees do drift a great deal - and not just within the apiary. Of course, if you have mostly the same type of bee in your area then you might not notice the interlopers!
Yes, I was puzzled by Roger's tests - especially as he intervened manually thus, I would suggest, invalidating the whole thing. I have repeated the tests, with better control, but the errors are similar. I agree that the errors introduced by the scanner (there are none introduced by the software) are not significant, although it is possible to produce some quite large errors by incorrect placing of the landmarks. For me, the most important thing is the grouping.
My selection is based on a whole raft of traits (some would say too many!) and morphometry is just one more tool in the box; and because of the time required it is the last tool to be used and then only on colonies that look promising.
I had not seen the Moritz paper. I did not see it as trying to invalidate wing morphometry, rather trying to show that the German breeding programme has failed.
Of course, our aims are very different to those in Germany - we are trying to eliminate the exotic species - not our native bees! Certainly shows that we have an uphill struggle on our hands.
I did not follow Richard Bache's posts as I found his attitude rather unpleasant.

[Jon]

Hi Peter
In defence of RB, I think he was just trying to draw attention to the over exuberance of some practitioners with regard to what morphometry can tell us.
I think he over stated his case at times but I enjoyed the debate.

That Moritz paper certainly highlights some of the potential pitfalls.
It is very significant that CI and DS were perfect in the bees sampled, yet other morphometric characteristics which had not been selected for showed clear evidence of hybridization between Carnica and Mellifera, ie, you are getting the wings you have selected for but you are not necessarily getting the underlying genetics which the wings are supposed to be diagnostic of.
With regard to selecting breeder queens, I think the main use of wing morphometry is to use wing venation to rule out colonies which look right, on colour for example, as opposed to selecting queens based on the best patterns.
The most pleasing scenario is when you have a really nice quiet and productive colony, provisionally marked as a potential breeder, and the morphometry carried out at the end of the year indicates that the it falls within amm limits and is not hybridized.

[Rosie]

The thing I disliked at Richard Bache's argument was his assertion that BIBBA breeders were basing all selection on wing morphometry and neglecting other characteristics. Even the BIBBA wing morphometry training days spent a considerable amount of time explaining and stressing the importance of other selection criteria despite the fact that these other criteria were already being used by the participants who were there to gain the expertise to add wing morphometry to their arsenal.

The big advantage I see in wing morphometry is that it can detect bad matings in your breeding stock a generation earlier than behavioural assessments can.

Rosie

[Peter]

These show the problems that we are up against in this area - bees that look native, but do not score highly. This is where morphometry seems to me to be a valuable tool.

706 is two generations on from a very good Ratnieks queen. Obviously it has breeding potential because we know its pedigree, but we would probably have to cull more than 50% of the queens produced.

751 is a queen that swarmed from a local feral colony. They look as native as you could wish for, but what is their true origin? Obviously quite a lot of A.m.m. I would suggest, but what have they crossed with? Italian? Carniolan? Again, it probably has breeding potential, but with considerable culling.



706.jpg751.jpg

[Jon]

My guess would be Carnica influence especially if they are dark.
If the influence were from Ligustica or Buckfast I think you would see some yellow banding in the first generation workers.
I posted a couple of similar scattergrams from bees in my fathers apiary right at the start of this thread. He has a near neighbour who brought in some queens from Slovenia a few years ago.

These two.
Sample A..jpg Sample B..jpg

[Peter]

Interesting that almost all of those have negative DsA - it is just the CI that has increased - as in my 706. However, in 751 the plots are heading Northeast.

Here we need answers from Kate!

[Jon]

Northeast is where you find Carnica on a scattergram!
Roll on the DNA analysis.

[gavin]

The Carnica influence is so insidious - superficially similar dark bees rather than colour-coded bees that are easy to spot.

As a practitioner of DNA methods I think that you may be putting too much faith in their ability to deliver a lot of clarity without a large amount of data. From what I've seen in the literature it is all to do with allele frequencies, and that means that characterizing individuals is hard. With a lot of DNA data you could say whether a particular sample matches this or that population, but are there reliable samples available of pure Amm from across the UK?

[gavin]

706 is two generations on from a very good Ratnieks queen. Obviously it has breeding potential because we know its pedigree, but we would probably have to cull more than 50% of the queens produced.

751 is a queen that swarmed from a local feral colony. They look as native as you could wish for, but what is their true origin? Obviously quite a lot of A.m.m. I would suggest, but what have they crossed with? Italian? Carniolan? Again, it probably has breeding potential, but with considerable culling.

Two generations on is too far to recover pure Amm, and how can you guarantee that the Sussex queen was not a hybrid anyway?

Presumably if they were Italian hybrids they would be yellow. Carnica hybrids should show the fringe of gingery rather than brown hairs - noticeable on the thorax - and short tergite hairs and maybe a more slender appearance. Can you spot these traits?

[Peter]

Well, we think there are pure samples in some areas - but will have to await Kate's verdict.