Morphological characteristics of Apis mellifera Meda (Hym.: Apidae) in Kerman (south of Iran)

Determining the condition of living animals and insect is the first step in programming on their races. For determining this issue in Apis mellifera of Kerman, it has been tried to evaluate the situation of honey bee masses by using the apparent characteristics in this province and also its relationship with the other races in the world. For this reason, measuring 10 characteristics of 600 worker bees from 150 colonies related to 6 apiaries of three cities as Baft, Jiroft and Kerman was done by Ruttner International Method. The analysis of measured parameters was shown that the considered populations had a relative low variety and they had only a difference in the length of fore wing. These populations, based on morphological characteristics, in the mapped tree were divided into groups as A (Baft) and B (Kerman–Jiroft). A comparison of this study with the previous ones was shown that the bees of south of Iran are became small, fat and light but the European races into Iran as Carniulan, Italian, caucasian and the masses of different parts of a country have a large distance. The imports of foreign races in two previous decades due to the stability of masses in Kerman and also the characteristics of this mass in comparison to the above races was stabilized.