Your gallery of 2D plots

[Jon]

I only have the one apiary. I take drone brood from preferred colonies and put it in others where I don't want them making drones.
This year I am hoping to link up with Ulster Bee Improvement Group.
Their mating apiary is only 7 miles from me and they have some Galtee queens so I hope to take some of my Apideas there. Some of my queens probably come into contact with those drones anyway given the relatively short distance involved.

Gavin - maybe you could make a few comments about the dangers of inbreeding and steps you can take to avoid it. I know there are also caveats attached to selecting on DrawWing plots alone.

[Peter]

Hi Everyone

Have to confess that I have not been following this forum as I have been overwhelmed! However, I have just had three e-mails in quick succession telling me about messages that have been posted - not sure why they arrived now as I have never had any before; Gavin?

I notice that the plots shown are not from the latest version of MorphPlot. We have been on 2.2 for along time now and it is available from:
http://www.stratfordbeekeepers.homec...phPlotV2.2.XLS

With regard to sending screen shots, the simplest and best software that I have found is Gadwin PrintScreen - and it is free (go down the page to the free version):
http://www.gadwin.com/download/
Very simple to use: when it is loaded, press your PrintScreen button, draw a marquee around what you want to capture, press return and then give the file a name.

I might try to upload some plots when I have a moment!

Best wishes

Peter

[busybeephilip]

So John,
what races of bee would be involved if you found positive DS and a CI under 2.0 ?

P

[Jon]

Hi Phil.
Good to get another man from Ulster on the forum. Can't let these Scots have it all their own way!

what races of bee would be involved if you found positive DS and a CI under 2.0 ?

It's hard to say as I have only seen data from Carnica and AMM.
I tend to use wing morphometry to exclude queens which have mated with non AMM drones, ie where the scattergram has a lot of points outside the AMM box. I would guess a lot of these drones are just from local mongrel stock or possibly Buckfast type bees.

[gavin]

You Ulstermen are most welcome to argue about morphometry and the like if you wish. We seem to have fallen fairly quiet for now.

[Jon]

Autumn is upon us and winter approaches which means that the bee nerds are turning their minds to morphometry.

col61.jpg

The queen heading this colony is from one of the first batches I grafted on 3rd May.
I requeened this colony with her in the middle of July so the bees sampled should all be her own offspring unless the odd one has drifted in.

In the sample of about 40 bees I noticed that 6 bees had a bit of yellow in the first segment. I scanned these separately as I thought they might produce different results but all 6 wings fell within the AMM limits.

This queen is a granddaughter of Galtee stock.

[kevboab]

Having never ventured down the road of morphometry I have a couple of questions.

Apart from using morphometry to determine AMM traits is there any use for morphometry to the beekeeper who stocks Italian, Buckfast, Carnies or even local crosses?

Are diagrams available showing where these other stocks should be plotting?

[Jimbo]

Hi Kevboab,

The answer is you could possibly use it to check how pure your strain was assuming that you have a pure strain to check. The problem is that most of the work using morphometry is used for checking Amm. If you look back through these posts in this thread you will see a plot for NZ carniolans posted by Jon,which was a pure strain and plots far away from Amm plot. I am unaware of anybody plotting other strains so you would need to obtain samples of these and see where they plot. DrawWing is a useful tool to determine if you have hybrid colonies or something near a pure Amm etc. You would also look at all the other traits for the species of interest eg Amm produce white cappings, have longer body hair, dark colour, narrow tomenta etc.
There is I think an american site where they used morphometry to eliminate their Amm and to improve their carniolans. The reverse of what we try to do in the UK

[Rosie]

I don't know of any scatterdiagrams that show other races but you can work it out for yourself using standard morphology data for other races. Dave Cushman's website has a good summary:

http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman/morphometry.html

It will give you all the wing details you need as well as plenty of other features such as hair length and colour.

I have never seen much talk about morphologyy of Buckfasts. I suspect each strain is different and they probably vary a lot within each colony. The Germans have used wing morphometry with carniolans and had considerable success. The main strength is that it shows up colonies that are different to the norm and this usually means that you have had a bad mating which has diluted the purity of the line. It also shows you when there exists a wide variety of genetics within a single colony which would make breeding from it a lottery. If you want to select for a mongrel strain you can define your own target shape, perhaps by copying your best colony, and that would help you select similar strains to mate with it. I suspect though that it would take many more generations to get a mongrel strain to become established and breeding true than it would a pure strain. It would also be more difficult to maintain the strain so you might never be able to stop the careful selection process.

Rosie

[Rosie]

This is what I made of Jon's data.

plot.JPG

While doing them I noticed the scan seems a bit sharper than mine. Yours was in colour as opposed to my greyscale and you use 2 slides where I put my wings onto the platten. I wonder what else is different with Jon's set-up. Jon, I think you said that you use the Epson V300 at 2400 dpi. You must use the positive film setting as I do so I can't think of anything else you might do differently.

I also noticed that 2 of the wings had that freaky short vein.

I remembered this evening, by the way, that I had not done much of the analysis on the sample I posted. It was done under my supervision by someone who had never done it before. I just did the first few wings to demonstrate the method. That shows how simple it is.

Rosie