Identification of an Unknown Sample of Honey Bee Wings: An Example From North India

Identification of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) subspecies is an important aspect of bee breeding and biodiversity conservation. The identification can be based on molecular or morphological markers. For some markers, including the cytochrome c oxidase subunit, there is a well-established methodology allowing consistent subspecies identification in different laboratories. In the case of morphological markers, identification is hindered by a lack of reference data and a standardized methodology to reuse it. We show here that reference data for the identification of honey bees based on geometric morphometrics can be saved in an XML file. The information in this file can be easily extracted by other users for the identification of unknown samples. We illustrate this procedure using ten samples from north India. The samples were identified as A. mellifera; next, they were identified as lineage C; and finally, most of the samples had high similarity to honey bees from Croatia and Slovenia. We explained what data is required for such identification and how it can be reused. The method described here can be applied not only to honey bee wings but also to all data based on landmark coordinates.