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  • Carlos Ariel Yadró García
    Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
  • Pedro João Rodrigues
    Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
  • Adam Tofilski
    University of Agriculture, Krakow
  • Dylan Elen
  • Grace P McCormak
    University of Galway
  • Andrzej Oleksa
    Kazimierz Wielki University
  • Dora Henriques
    Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
  • Rustem Ilyasov
    Bashkir State Agrarian University
  • Anatoly Kartashev
  • Christian Bargain
    Association pour la Sauvegarde de l’Abeillee Noire
  • Balser Fried
    Swiss Association of Mellifera Bee Friends
  • Maria Alice Pinto
    Instituto Politécnico de Bragança
DeepWings© is a software that uses machine learning to automatically classify honey bee subspecies by wing geometric morphometrics. Here, we tested the five subspecies classifier (A. m. carnica, Apis mellifera caucasia, A. m. iberiensis, Apis mellifera ligustica, and A. m. mellifera) of DeepWings© on 14,816 wing images with variable quality and acquired by different beekeepers and researchers. These images represented 2601 colonies from the native ranges of the M-lineage A. m. iberiensis and A. m. mellifera, and the C-lineage A. m. carnica. In the A. m. iberiensis range, 92.6% of the colonies matched this subspecies, with a high median probability (0.919). In the Azores, where the Iberian subspecies was historically introduced, a lower proportion (85.7%) and probability (0.842) were observed. In the A. m mellifera range, only 41.1 % of the colonies matched this subspecies, which is compatible with a history of C-derived introgression. Yet, these colonies were classified with the highest probability (0.994) of the three subspecies. In the A. m. carnica range, 88.3% of the colonies matched this subspecies, with a probability of 0.984. The association between wing and molecular markers, assessed for 1214 colonies from the M-lineage range, was highly significant but not strong (r = 0.31, p < 0.0001). The agreement between the markers was influenced by C-derived introgression, with the best results obtained for colonies with high genetic integrity. This study indicates the good performance of DeepWings© on a realistic wing image dataset.

Keywords

  • Introgression, Wing Geometric Morphometrics, Apis Mellifera Subspecies, Honey Bee Classification, Honey Bee Conservation
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1132
Number of pages18
JournalInsects
Volume13
Issue number12
Early online date8 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Dec 2022

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