https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9613-3251
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Abstract
The Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica) is an indigenous subspecies of the Western honey bee in Central Europe. Croatia represents a large part of its native range. Hybridization and introgression is a realistic possibility due to unmonitored imports by beekeepers. In this study, we focused on honey bee colonies managed by beekeepers from all over Croatia and Slovenia. The identification of the subspecies was based on wing geometric morphometrics. The similarity of all investigated colonies to A. m. carnica was substantial, which indicates that the native subspecies continues to be present in the study area. However, some of the colonies differed markedly from the currently available reference of this subspecies. The low similarity with reference samples can be related both to hybridization with non-native subspecies and to natural geographical variation within A. m. carnica. The data and results obtained from this morphometric analysis will provide a deeper insight into the phenotypic characterization of the studied honey bee populations and directions for future conservation strategies.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We thank Stefan Fuchs for providing reference samples of A. m. carnica.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that they have no potential conflict of interest in relation to the study in this paper.
Supplementary material
Supplementary Table 1 and Figures 1–3 are available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2020.1843847).