Turkish Journal of Veterinary and Animal Sciences

Abstract: Thirty-one morphological characteristics of randomly selected honeybees known to come from each of six populations were examined for differences. Multivariate discriminant analysis was employed to describe the differential features of observations from 6 known Anatolian honeybee ( Apis mellifera L.) races and ecotypes. As a consequence of the statistical analysis it was found that length of hair on the tergite 5, width of tomentum on tergite 4, width of tregite 3, distance between wax mirrors, length of cubital vein b, angles on front wing venation (A 4 , B 4 , D 7 , G1 2 , L 13 and O 26) were significant (P<0.01), and sufficient enough to discriminate between the populations. However, 93.72% of the total variation was explained by the first three canonical discriminant functions.

Key Words: Anatolian honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) genotypes, morphological characters, discriminant analysis.