THE IDENTIFICATION OF AFRICANIZED HONEY-BEES - AN ASSESSMENT OF MORPHOMETRIC, BIOCHEMICAL, AND MOLECULAR APPROACHES

African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) were introduced into Br azil in 1955 with the intention of providing improved honey bee breedi ng stock for Brazilian apiculture. The spread of the descendants of th e introduced African bees, known as Africanized bees, was a matter for scientific study and regulatory concern. This attention produced the need for an identification tool that could be employed in research, su rvey, and detection and regulation. In part due to a long history of s tudy and in part due to its intrinsic value, the discriminant analysis of morphometric data has become the tool of choice for identifying Af ricanized honey bees. Cost of analysis led to the development of simpl e methods to screen large numbers of samples without sacrificing the o verall quality of identifications. With these screening procedures, al l colonies that are determined to be European at a P greater than or e qual to 0.99 are considered European. All colonies that are not determ ined to be European are considered unidentified. Samples which remain unidentified after the initial screening are identified by a more comp lex morphometric procedure called USDA-ID. USDA-ID was developed prima rily to provide several laboratories that were established to morpholo gically identify honey bees for regulatory purposes more accurate iden tification tools based on new discriminant analysis procedures. The ch aracteristics of these procedures are discussed and their weaknesses a nd strengths are compared to those of several other identification too ls.