Overview
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (14 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
The Western Honeybee Apis mellifera L. Classification and Natural History
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Honeybees are as small as flies or as large as hornets, nesting in nar row cavities of trees and rocks or in the open on large limbs of trees 30 m above ground. They occur in tropical zones and in the forests of the Ural mountains, they survive seven months of winter and even longer periods of drought and heat. Historically, they lived through a extended time of stagnation in the tropics from the mid-Tertiary, but then experienced an explosive evolution during the Pleistocene, re sulting in the conquest of huge new territories and the origin of two dozen subspecies in Apis mellifera. This vast geographic and ecologic diversification of the genus Apis was accompanied by a rich morphological variation, less on the level of species than at the lowest rank, the subspecies level. Variation being exclusively of a quantitative kind at this first step of speciation, tradi tional descriptive methods of systematics proved to be unsatisfactory, and honeybee taxonomy finally ended up in a confusing multitude of inadequately described units. Effective methods of morphometric-sta tistical analysis of honeybee popUlations, centered on limited areas, have been developed during the last decades. Only the numerical characterization of the populations, together with the description of behavior, shows the true geographic variability and will end current generalizations and convenient stereotypes.
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Biogeography and Taxonomy of Honeybees
Authors: Friedrich Ruttner
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-72649-1
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
-
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1988
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-642-72651-4Published: 14 November 2012
eBook ISBN: 978-3-642-72649-1Published: 09 March 2013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 284
Number of Illustrations: 106 b/w illustrations