Characterization of the native honey bee subspecies in Saudi Arabia using the mtDNA COI–COII intergenic region and morphometric characteristics
Journal Article
ALGHAMDI, Ahmad . 2014
المجلة \ الصحيفة:
Bulletin of Insectology
رقم العدد:
1
رقم الإصدار السنوي:
67
الصفحات:
1-7
مستخلص المنشور:
The honey bee, Apis mellifera L. 1758, is naturally found throughout Europe, Africa and Western Asia (Miguel et al., 2011). In recent years, based on morphometry, 26 subspecies have been identified and clustered into four evolutionary lineages (Ruttner, 1988; Sheppard et al., 1997; Engel, 1999; Sheppard and Meixner, 2003; Miguel et al., 2011). The indigenous honey bee of Saudi Arabia, which is the focus of this publication, was characterized morphometrically by Ruttner in 1975 as Apis mellifera jemenitica, a honey bee subspecies that has evolved and adapted to hot and adverse climatic conditions. Recently, significant morphometric variations revealed three well-defined clusters of the native honey bee in Saudi Arabia (AlGhamdi et al., 2012). Although morphological charac-teristics are still considered very important in the classifi-cation of honey bees, this approach is not well suited to characterize honey bee subspecies and analyze phyloge-netic relationships, as they can be sensitive to environ-mental selection pressures (Franck et al., 2000b). Genetic markers such as the mtDNA COI–COII intergenic region are unique to the genus Apis (Cornuet and Garnery, 1991). Variations in the sequences of this region or the length of fragments produced using endonucleases are used extensively to differentiate among five honey bee lineages and to discriminate among A. mellifera subspe-cies (Garnery et al., 1992; Franck et al., 2000a; Sheppard and Smith, 2000). Sequencing is more sensitive and may reveal new haplotypes that have not been previously de-scribed (Ozdil et al., 2009; Solorzano et al., 2009; Mag-nus and Szalanski, 2010; Szalanski and Magnus, 2010). To date, a characterization of the Saudi honey bee is lack-ing. In the present study, morphological characteristics and mtDNA COI-COII sequence data were used to char-acterize the honey bees within Saudi Arabia.
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