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Abstract:
Measuring honey bee morphological characters is very important for systematic purposes and for measuring the degree of hybridization among populations. The traditional method for mounting honey bee body parts requires mounting on glass slides, sometimes with the use of permanent or temporary dyes. This is particularly tedious and time-consuming in investigations examining large numbers of individuals. Here we describe a simple method for mass mounting of honey bee body parts, including heads, wings and legs, to facilitate taking morphological measurements.
Keywords: Apis mellifera/ morphometric, honey bee mass/ mounting.
Introduction:
The importance of measuring morphological characters is well known. There are different purposes for measuring honey bee morphological characters including classification and characterization (e.g. Ruttncr 1975, Sheppard et al. 1997), identifying the degree of hybridization among populations (Radloff et al., 2003), and indirectly identifying economic characteristics (Edriss et al. 2002). There are many methods for measuring morphological characters; the traditional method depends on using an ocular micrometer mounted on a stereomicroscope (Ruttner et al. 1978). Projectors have also been used in some morphometric work (Kandemir et al. 2000). Also, various computer programs such as AutoCAD (Miladenovic et al. 2011), Photoshop (AbouShaara et al. 2012) and other image programs (Jones et al. 2005, Andere et al. 2008) have been employed for taking morphological measurements. Preparing body parts for taking morphological measurements is a problem, especially in cases where thousands of parts must be mounted and measured. Here we describe a fast, simple, inexpensive method for mounting honey bee body parts. The mounted body parts can then be scanned and transferred as images for subsequent analysis.
Materials and...