MORPHOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION OF AFRICANIZED AND EUROPEAN HONEY-BEES USING LARGE REFERENCE POPULATIONS

New discriminant analysis procedures have been presented to identify Africanized and European honey bees. These procedures are founded on data from 2 103 samples of honey bees collected from colonies at several locations in the western hemisphere and Kangaroo Island, Australia. Various univariate and multivariate analyses have been used to select the morphological characteristics and the groups of characteristics to be used in the analysis. The multivariate discriminant analysis correctly identified 565 (95.6%) of the 591 Africanized colonies and correctly identified all of the 1 512 European colonies.