The pattern of the veins of the wings is specific for each breed of bees. To measure some characteristics of the pattern is an established method to distinguish breeds from each other. We have developed a computer program and a measuring method using a scanner or a digital camera to help us in the selection of the breeding material.
As early as 1910 some scientists started to use biometric methods to distinguish breeds from each other.
The Russian bee scientist V. V. Alpatov performed in the years 1924 to 1958 an extensive and important study of the geographical influence of the morphology of the bees. Together with the Austrian scientist Friedrich Ruttner he also developed a method for classifying bees by using the cubital index.
The German scientist Goetze has further developed this method.
In Sweden there were some beekeepers during the 60´s that were using wing index but not in a large scale.
We started to measure wings in the middle of the 80´s by using a slide projector or a microscope.
The cubital index, Ci, is defined as the quotient between the length of two veins, a and b, of the third Cubital cell.
This quotient differs from around 1 to above 3,
Apis mellifera mellifera having the lowest value and
Apis mellifera carnica the largest.
Another property that differs between the breeds is the position of the crossing (8) of two veins in the discoidal cell compared to a line from the radial cell.
A pure mellifera should have this point to the left of the line as shown in the picture.
The discoidal shift angle, DsA, is then defined as negative.
Hantel index = "5-7" / "3-4"
It is defined as the distance between points 5 and 7 divided by the distance between points 3 and 4.
The right fore wing from 25 - 30 bees were glued to a slide glass and projected on the wall.
We used an electronic calculator to determine the quotient and the results were noted by hand.
It was a time-consuming method.
To use a microscope and projectors are tiring. When scanners with high resolution became cheaper we acquired one.
We also developed a program for MS Excel where we entered the coordinates for eight points on the wing (as shown in the picture above).
We fixed the wings first on a strip of tape, e.g. Scotch Magic Tape 810, and then we attached the tape on a film used for OH projectors and put the film on the scanner.
Scanner requirements: The requirement for the scanner is an optical resolution of at least 1200 dpi.
Accuracy: The accuracy we get in a single wing measurement is around
for Ci +/- 0.06
for DsA +/- 0.25 degrees
for Hantelindex +/- 0.012
The scanned image is opened in the CooRecorder program. We record eight points for each wing. The points are automatically recorded when we click on them with the mouse.
The resulting coordinate file is then opened in the CBeeWing program. The result is two diagrams both with the discoidal shift angle as the y-axis. The left diagram has the cubital index as x-axis, the right diagram has the Hantel index as x-axis.
Pure Mellifera
Mellifera queen inseminated with Mellifera drones
Hybrid colony
Mellifera queen free mated in surroundings of hive
The pictures show the results from a pure mellifera colony and a hybrid colony.
In the program we can introduce the limits for the values of cubital and Hantel index and discoidal shift angle we consider valid for a pure breed. The program calculates the fraction of bees in the sample that comply with the standard.
Based on the results we have obtained from our tests with single drone insemination we have introduced the following criteria for pure mellifera:
Cubital index upper limit: 1.9
Discoidal shift angle upper limit: 0
According to Ruttner a mellifera bee could have a cubital index of 2. We still think it is better to use a lower index to really be on the safe side when selecting a colony as a base for further breeding.
Alleged Mellifera colony (from old Excel plot)
To breed pure bees we need more properties than colour for selection. To measure the vein pattern on the wings is a reliable method.
As computers and scanners are available for most beekeepers today we strongly recommend using them for selecting colonies for rearing.
We have seen many examples on colonies that show a typical mellifera colour but have wing properties that indicates a high degree of mixture with other breeds, see picture above.
To measure only the cubital index is not enough but combined with the discoidal shift angle it gives sufficient information for sorting out hybrids.
Even if a pure queen is mated by some pure drones and some from a different breed the offspring could be used in the breeding if the resulting queens are investigated by this method and those with wrong values are sorted out.
Gallery name: %%eUsing the CooRecorder and CBeeWing programs to select bees for breeding
The pattern of the veins of the wings is specific for each breed of bees. It is an established method to measure characteristics of this pattern to distinguish breeds from each other.
Bees of pure breed are often good and kind bees. Here we describe a simple method to distinguish bees of a more pure breed from other bees. This method can quite easily be used by any interested bee-keeper who wants to choose the best colony to pick new queens from.
A number of beewings from a colony is mounted on a paper which is then scanned as an image on a standard office scanner. The wings can also be mounted on transparent film and scanned in a standard film scanner.
Mount a piece of tape with the sticky side upwards on a cardboard or stiff paper or easiest directly onto your desk. Put crossing bits of tape at the ends to keep it down.
Note: An alternative to this is using tape with adhesive coating on each side when mounting on paper or cardboard or on transparent film (when using a film scanner).
Place the wings on the tape. See that the wings are mounted quite near each other to make the scanned image as small as possible. Mount all wings in the same direction to make the successive coordinate recordings in CooRecorder more uniform and by that easier.
When you are ready with the wings put transparent film over the wings and towards the sticky tape.
Remove the whole thing from your table and put it onto your scanner with the transparent side downwards.
Make a scan of the sample. Select a high resolution corresponding to the optical resolution of your scanner.
Note: If you have no tranparent film at hand, you may put an extra layer of tape over the wings. But then the light from the scanner has to go through a layer of adhesive coating before it hits the wings. This distorts the picture of the wings.
Various brands of tape have different characteristics. Some have a more uniform coating than others. This matters when you are using a film scanner as you then have to let the light go through at least one layer of adhesive coating.
Click on File/Open image file for new coordinates and select your wing image file.
Enter the proper dpi resolution value used when you scanned the image. Select raw data mode and click OK.
Click on the Comments button and enter a suitable name of this wing group, e.g. "Hive number 1"
Click on the actual pixels button to get a high magnification. Use the hand tool and the scroll bars to position the picture properly. Click on the magnifying glass button. Then click the first wing repeatedly until its size fills up your screen.
Select data picking mode and see that "more than one point per line" is selected. (then there are three white dots at the button face)
Start recording the first group:
Be very careful with setting the points in their correct order, i.e. 1 to 8 exactly as shown in the picture.
When you have clicked at the crossing point number 8, press the Enter key or click the End of data group button.
Then continue with the next wing.
Replacing a point
If you want to replace (move) a single point:
Click on "Select a point mode (the button goes black). Then click on the appropriate point.
Click on "Replace selected point" and Click the place where you want the point repositioned.
Marking to identify a certain wing
You may attach a small comment to a wing, like e.g. "W2" for wing 2.
In that case write "W2" into the Point label field before you click any of the points of that wing. The label will be shown near the first point of the wing.
When all wings have been measured click on File/Save as ... and save your new bee wing coordinate file with an appropriate name e.g. hive1.pos
After start up, click on File/Open Wing coordinate file and select your wing file.
The wing data will be shown plotted in a diagram and also as numerical values in a list.
If there is anything wrong with a wing measurement, e.g. a missing point, that line is marked with a "B" (Bad values).
In the diagram the Discoidal shift Angle (DsA) is on the vertical axis and the Cubital index (Ci) is on the horizontal axis.
The red box in the diagram marks the limits for the choosen bee type, in this case "Mellifera". When the points are plotted closely connected within the box this signifies a typical pure Mellifera colony. When the points are spread over the diagram as shown above this signifies a colony mixed up with several breeds.
Below the diagram is a small report with mean values and standard deviations. On the first line there is also a value telling the percentage of wings falling inside the red box.
Note: As you will see when you read on, there is another type of selection criteria/red box for a wing index named "Hantel index". That proportion of wings which match all selection criterias are displayed on the last line of the report as eg. "14% within all limits for Mellifera".
Note: Before you load a new file with bee wing coordinates, you have to first empty the "wing basket" by clicking on the clear button. But this also implies that you can easily collect wing data from several coordinate files and have them calculated as a sum. In that case, don't clear the "wing basket" before loading the next file.
Sometimes one or two wings are plotted at some distance away from the rest of the points. This may signify wings which are not representative to this colony, e.g. they may come from another colony. This is a reason to remove them from the mean value calculations.
If so, click on the actual point and then click on the button "Disable wing measurement" The Report box is immediatly updated and the point turns red in the diagram. The line in the list will get a "D" in front of it.
Note: You may click either on a line in the list or on a point in the diagram. In any case both the list line and the point will get marked as shown above.
Printing on paper: If you need the plot on plain paper for filing, click on the "Print result" button. (Note: Disabled points are not plotted on paper.)
Other wing types:
If you want to test your bee wings against other limits, this can easily be done by creating a new wing type within the program.
Click on Settings/Edit Wing types. Then click on the New wing type button and set the various fields as appropriate. Click on update to enter your new values into the list and click on save to actually save your values within the program.
When back at the diagram select the appropriate wingtype from the combo box at the top of the form. The red line box will move and resize as defined by your new wing type.
You can also display the hantel indexes of your bee wings in a separate diagram.
To do that, click the corresponding check box at the top left part of your screen.
You may have both diagrams open at the same time and even have them printed together on paper.
There is also a third diagram showing the Hantel Index versus the Cubital index of your wings.
Click the corresponding check box at the top left part of your screen to get this diagram.
Note: The diagrams are printed on paper with a height which allows for all three on one paper. When printing only one or two diagrams you can get them somewhat larger (higher) by first checking "Setting/Larger printed diagrams" at the top menu bar. This may be useful if you need a larger diagram to be shown with an overhead projector.
Pure Mellifera
Mellifera queen inseminated with Mellifera drones
Hybrid colony
Mellifera queen free mated in surroundings of hive
A good criteria for selecting pure breed is to find samples (wings from one hive) where the points are not scattered around but concentrated around one point.
Worst to select when wanting pure breed is a sample where all points are scattered over the diagram. That is a real intermix! They are usually very vivid.
When a pure queen is mated by some pure drones and some from a different breed the plot of wings from that colony will show more than one concentration of points. This queen can be used in breeding if the resulting queens are investigated by this method and those with wrong values are sorted out. In any case this queen is pure Mellifera and she can breed a lot of very pure Mellifera drones.
When cutting a wing of an egg laying queen, do carefully save the wing and measure it so that you know her characteristics.
Now, what bees do I myself have in my apiary? The program says they are not Mellifera! The crosses are all outside the red boxes in both diagrams. I say: "It is fine that the diagrams agree"!
Though when inspecting a coordinate file made from 30 wings from Per Thunman I found that for about one third of the wings "the diagrams disagreed very much"! I.e. one diagram plotted the wing inside the red box saing "this is Mellifera" and the other diagram plotted it long way outside the red box saying "it's not!". But both diagrams said 32% Mellifera. You can look at the phenomenon by clicking on the first line in the list. Then repeatedly press the down-arrow key on your keyboard to select the next point. You can see the points jumping around in the diagrams!
I do not know if this anomaly is a serious problem when deciding what is Mellifera.
About precision
To find out the actual measurement precision I made 10 measurements of the same wing. After putting these measurements together in one coordinate file I made a plot of them with CBeeWing. This operation was done with three different wings.
One wing was scanned with a 1600 dpi high quality scanner (Epson Expression 1680), the other two wings with a Nikon LS-2000 film scanner with 2700 dpi resolution.
The standard deviations for these measurement were found to be: for DsA: 0.25, for Ci 0.06, for Hi 0.012
Thus when printing the values from one measurement of a bee wing I have decided to let the program print one decimal for DsA (though a bit optimistic), one decimal for Ci and 2 decimals for Hi.
This means that the precision of one measurement of a bee wing could be given as
DsA= 3.2 +/- 0.3 i.e. the decimal is a bit optimistic
Ci = 2.2 +/- 0.1 (i.e. you can trust this single decimal)
Hi = 0.98 +/- 0.01 ( --"-- )
When calculating mean values we may use one more extra decimal, but if this is of any significance when selecting for breed is another question!
Saltsjöbaden 20 January 2003
Lars-Åke Larsson
Gallery name: %%eDownloading CBeeWing - Cybis Bee Wing analyzer%%sNedladdning av CBeeWing - analys av bivingar
You are free to download the CBeeWing program from this site and use it as you like. Though you are NOT allowed to distribute CBeeWing in any way to other persons. But we would really appreciate if you direct them here to our site at www.cybis.se
Though Cybis CBeeWing is free of charge, it is protected by the copyright laws.
Du får ladda ner programmet CBeeWing alldeles gratis från vår sajt. Men du har INTE lov att på något sätt distribuera CBeeWing till andra. Men jag blir glad om du tipsar dem om att programmet finns för nedladdning här på www.cybis.se.
Även om CBeeWing är gratis, så är programmet skyddat av lagarna om upphovsrätt.
I am happy if you write me a letter in connection with downloading CBeeWing. And please tell me how you plan to use the program. Knowing there are some users out there makes it meaningful to me to continue developing the program and to make it available. With your email address available I also have a chance to inform you about new versions of the program.
And please write me a note about bugs you find in the program so I can correct what is wrong!
Saltsjöbaden 22 January 2003
Lars-Åke Larsson -
Jag vore väldigt glad om du skriver ett brev till mig och berättar att du tänker använda programmet. Med användare känns det meningsfullt att vidareutveckla programmet och att hålla det tillgängligt. Om jag har din adress så har jag också en möjlighet att informera dig om nya versioner.
Och om du hittar fel i programmet: Skriv en rad så att jag kan rätta felet!
Saltsjöbaden 22 januari 2003
Lars-Åke Larsson
For downloading, click on the link below:
(Current version 1.1.3. 2003-01-22)
CBeeWing installation program: Download the CBeeWing program (2.6 MB)
Installation: Install CBeeWing by starting the downloaded program CBeeWingInstall.exe
För nedladdning, klicka på nedanstående länk:
(Aktuell version 1.1.3. 2003-01-22)
CBeeWing installationsprogram: Ladda ner CBeeWing programmet (2.6 MB)
Installation: Starta den nedladdade installationsfilen CBeeWingInstall.exe
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