The identification of Africanized honey bees: An assessment of morphometric, biochemical, and molecular approaches

African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) were introduced into Brazil in 1955 with the intention of providing improved honey bee breeding stock for Brazilian apiculture. The spread of the descendants of the introduced African bees, known as Africanized bees, was a matter for scientific study and regulatory concern. This attention produced the need for an identification tool that could be employed in research, survey, and detection and regulation. In part due to a long history of study and in part due to its intrinsic value, the discriminant analysis of morphometric data has become the tool of choice for identifying Africanized honey bees. Cost of analysis led to the development of simple methods to screen large numbers of samples without sacrificing the overall quality of identifications. With these screening procedures, all colonies that are determined to be European at a P greater than or equal to 0.99 are considered European. All colonies that are not determined to be European are considered unidentified. Samples which remain unidentified after the initial screening are identified by a more complex morphometric procedure called USDA-ID. USDA-ID was developed primarily to provide several laboratories that were established to morphologically identify honey bees for regulatory purposes more accurate identification tools based on new discriminant analysis procedures. The characteristics of these procedures are discussed and their weaknesses and strengths are compared to those of several other identification tools.