Study of the length of the mouthparts of Africanized, Caucasian and Africanized/Caucasian honey bee crosses, and relationships between glossa size and food gathering behavior

Abstract

The lengths of the mouthparts of bees, the glossa, paraglossa, stipes, galea, labial palpus, maxillary palpus, cardo, lorum, mentum and prementum, were studied in Caucasian and Africanized bees and in their F1 descendants. Only the lengths of the paraglossa, stipe, galea, mentum, prementum and maxillary palpus differed significantly between these two bee types. These six variables were studied in the F1 descendants of two types of crosses, i.e., Caucasian queens x Africanized males (cross 1) and Africanized queens x Caucasian males (cross 2). Multidimensional analyses were also performed and the generalized Mahalanobis distances (D2) between the F1 descendants and the parental lines were determined. There was an apparent dominance of Africanized bees in both unidimensional and multidimensional analyses. Correlation analysis showed that bees with longer glossae collected more food (sugar syrup) and flew more slowly from the colony to the food source.