Evaluation of morphometric characters of honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) populations in Nigeria
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Entomology, Taxonomy, Zoology
- Keywords
- Apis mellifera, honeybee, African bees, morphometry, Nigeria
- Copyright
- © 2016 Dukku
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Evaluation of morphometric characters of honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) populations in Nigeria. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1680v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1680v1
Abstract
Samples of workers of honeybee were collected from 41 colonies in nine localities in Nigeria and analysed using classical morphometry. Measurements of 35 morphological characters of body size, colour and pilosity were taken from 10 workers per colony and the data subjected to one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and principal component analysis. Although ANOVA revealed a considerable variation of morphological characters between the sampled localities, principal component analysis indicated that this variation was not sufficient to group the colonies under investigation into geographically separable groups. Based on the agreement between the results of this study and those of previous studies, it is concluded that the honeybees of this area are morphometrically pure populations of sub-Saharan A. mellifera.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.