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The morphological characteristics of drone wings were studied at apiaries in Khmelnytskyi, Lviv, Zhy-tomyr, Kyiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv oblasts of Ukraine. Using the classical morphometry, the mean values of 8 traits (indices: Ci, Dbi, Disc.sh, Pci, Ri (traditional), Ci.3, Ci.2.1, Ci.2.2 (proposed by the authors)) were obtained for individual clusters of drone wings from the studied colonies. The phenotypic identity of 299 drone wing clusters was determined, 114 of which were classified as belonging to the subspecies A.m.carnica, 107 to the population of Ukrainian honeybees (proposed indice: "UkrBee"), and 78 to the population of Ukrainian steppe honeybees (proposed indice: "UkrStep"). An additional allocation of individual wings for each cluster was carried out among three reference groups (templates), one of which belonged to the subspecies Apis mellifera carnica, while the other two represented the local populations with subspecies affiliation not reliably established. Based on this classification, the degrees of similarity (DS) of the larger and smaller parts of the wings in each studied cluster to the main and "admixture" phenotypes were determined. The authors propose using the degree of similarity (DS) for the smaller portion of the colony cluster sample as an indicator of hybridization and designate it as the degree of hybridization (DH) of queen genomes in the region responsible for the wing phenotype. To determine the relationships between Mahalanobis distances (MD), classification traits: Ci, Disc.sh on the one hand, and hybridization type and DS on the other, a variance analysis was performed. The obtained statistically significant relationships allowed analyzing the morphometric data in order to assess the type and degree of similarity among drone wing phenotypes. A method of determining the total genome hybridization of drone genomes in the part responsible for wing morphology, for individual colonies of honeybee populations in Ukraine has been proposed.
Babenko et al. (Fri,) studied this question.