The first Apis mellifera mellifera

[gavin]

Hi All

These days I don't look through the other fora as often as I used to, but this morning noticed on the Beekeeping forum a thread by Paleoperson on specimens of honeybee preserved by Carl Linnaeus, the man who described Apis mellifera in 1758. There are pictures on the Linnean Society's website (http://www.linnean-online.org/16019/).

Anyone fancy rustling up a quick scatterplot?

Gavin

[Jon]

Ruttner did the morphometry on those wings in the 1980s.
There is a table on P42 of the Dark European Honeybee comparing these wings with modern AMM, AM Iberica, and AM Carnica, along with the York and Oslo wings,
He did morphometry on wings from archaeological specimens found in York circa 1000 AD and Oslo circa 1200 AD

The measurements from the wings in the Linnean collection are:

CI Di Shift
Bee 1 left wing 1.61 -4.7
Right wing 1.58 -2.5

Bee 2 left wing 1.94 -4.5
right wing - -2.5

Bee 3 left wing 1.91 -5
Right wing 1.82 +1
mean 1.82 -3.33