Quote Originally Posted by greengumbo View Post
....as long as limitations are understood.
!
Sadly they aren't as you often hear someone who has say 40/50 wings in the Amm cuadrant claiming that his bees are 80% Amm.
In fact they could be 100% Amm or10% Amm. Wing morphometry is not going to tell you that.
It should be able to pick out hybrids from a mostly pure race population, which look right in other ways.
The Moritz paper which was published over 20 years ago blows the entire concept out of the water and Kate Thompson's more recent work at Leeds showed little or no correlation between Amm pattern wings and the underlying genetics.
Ruttner never envisaged that wing morphometry would be used by people working with hybridised populations.
It distinguishes effectively between pure race subspecies but you don't actually need to scan wings to tell the difference between mellifera and ligustica or carnica anyway.