Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Wing geometric morphometrics has been applied to honey bees (Apis mellifera) in
identification of evolutionary lineages or subspecies and, to a lesser extent, in assessing genetic
structure within subspecies. Due to bias in the production of sterile females (workers) in a colony,
most studies have used workers leaving the males (drones) as a neglected group. However,
considering their importance as reproductive individuals, the use of drones should be incorporated
in these analyses in order to better understand diversity patterns and underlying evolutionary
processes. Here, we assessed the usefulness of drone wings, as well as the power of wing geometric
morphometrics, in capturing the signature of complex evolutionary processes by examining wing
shape data, integrated with geographical information, from 711 colonies sampled across the entire
distributional range of Apis mellifera iberiensis in Iberia. We compared the genetic patterns reconstructed
fromspatially-explicit shape variation extracted fromwings of both sexes with that previously reported
using 383 genome-wide SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Our results indicate that the spatial
structure retrieved from wings of drones and workers was similar (r = 0.93) and congruent with that
inferred from SNPs (r = 0.90 for drones; r = 0.87 for workers), corroborating the clinal pattern that has
been described for A. m. iberiensis using other genetic markers. In addition to showing that drone
wings carry valuable genetic information, this study highlights the capability of wing geometric
morphometrics in capturing complex genetic patterns, o ering a reliable and low-cost alternative for
preliminary estimation of population structure.
Description
Keywords
Iberian honey bee SNPs Spatial population structure Spatial principal component analysis (sPCA)
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Henriques, Dora; Chávez-Galarza, Julio; Teixeira, Juliana S.G.; Ferreira, Helena; Neves, Cátia J.; Francoy, Tiago M.; Pinto, M. Alice (2020). Wing geometric morphometrics of workers and drones and single nucleotide polymorphisms provide similar genetic structure in the iberian honey bee (Apis mellifera iberiensis). Insects. ISSN 2075-4450. 11:2, p. 1-14