I

Anno 2 N. 2
Ignazio Floris [1], Alberto Satta [1], Raffaele Dall’Olio [2], Marco Lodesani [2]

Studying methods and management of honeybee races in Italy

[1] Dip. Protezione delle Piante - Sez. Entomologia agraria, Università degli Studi di Sassari, Italy
[2] CRA - Istituto nazionale di apicoltura, Italy

Corresponding author: ifloris@uniss.it

In Italy, four subspecies of Apis mellifera L. have been detected: the authocthonal races A. m. ligustica Spinola (1806) and A. m. sicula Montagano (1911), and the hybrids of A. m. mellifera Linnaeus (1758) and A. m. carnica Pollmann (1879) with A. m. ligustica.
Morphometric, biochemical and molecular markers were studied in order to characterize these subspecies and define hybrid zones between A. m. ligustica and either A.m. mellifera or A.m. carnica populations in the North, and between A. m. ligustica and A.m. sicula in South. Morphometric studies, which provided a large amount of data, were developed using an increasing number of characters as colour, size, hair and fore wing venation. Studies on allozyme variability considered different polymorphic loci as Esterase-3, Esterase-6, Malate Dehydrogenase-1 and other enzyme systems; moreover molecular markers such as mithochondrial DNA (COI – COII DraI test) and microsatellite loci (A113, A28, Ab24, A14, A107, A88, Ap43, A7) have been more recently analyzed. An important progress in these studies was reached during the last years by the application of appropriate statistical methods and computer-assisted procedures.
Apart from these different markers, various sampling and statistical methods were adopted, which in some cases affected the results and the significance of the discriminations.
In order to protect and improve by breeding programs the most important Italian races, ligustica and sicula, the "Albo nazionale degli allevatori di api regine" was recently enacted. A database “DataBees” was also developed in order to acquire, store and manage morphometric data for the race classification.