Your gallery of 2D plots

[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

[Jon]

Hi Steve.
This was my version.
looks like a reasonable match.

75-apidea.jpg

I use the Epson V330 at 2400 dpi.

I noticed the truncated veins as well. They seem to crop up on a regular basis.
You can see the difference here.

normal wing vein.jpgtruncated wing vein.jpg

[Rosie]

Mine's a V330 too. I will try scanning mine in colour next time and see what happens. It could be that the system focusses just above the platten where a projector slide would sit. In which case the bottom slide is helpful after all.

I think your plot and mine are near enough to say the system is repeatable for practical purposes. The only significant difference is the three wings with high CI on mine. I just double checked them and would stand by 2 but the third could be a fraction lower although still over the red line.

Rosie

[Rosie]

Jon

Out of interest I just checked your normal wing in post 183. I got CI=1.5453 and DS=-3.1434

I wonder what you would get.

Rosie

[gavin]

Here are the wings of a colony of Rosie's under discussion, CD18.

Enjoy!

[gavin]

This is what I made of Jon's data.

plot.JPG

Rosie

I see a man in an egg-and-spoon race, wearing some kind of weird head-dress of long feather plumes.

[Jon]

On my original scan from December I had

cubital_index 1.6804
discoidal_shift -3.9159

I did it again 5 minutes ago taking more care than normal at high magnification and got:

cubital_index 1.5753
discoidal_shift -3.3571

Tiny movements of the points can make quite a difference to the values but if the sample is large enough I imagine it all evens out.
In the original reading I hadn't moved the points manually so that is where drawwing placed them by default.

[Jon]

I see a man in an egg-and-spoon race, wearing some kind of weird head-dress of long feather plumes.

Have you been smoking something funny?

Must be Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent.

[gavin]

That's the one! It wasn't an egg and spoon after all but the thing that Quetzalcoatl is holding looks like the instrument doctors use to look into into your ear. Not smoking, but I'll admit to nice single malt after the exertions of two nights out on beekeeping talk duty. A god of fertility (OK, that fits) and internal political structures .... I wonder if Alex Salmond is involved. No, sorry, should stay clear of politics ...