The Asian species of Apis

Abstract

The history of the systematics of the Asian honeybee species is given, including discussions of paradigm shifts in the definition of species as earlier taxonomic methods evolved and were gradually replaced by an emphasis on populations, the statistical distributions of morphological characters and the reconstruction of evolutionary lineages. The limits of Asian species have been defined using principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, cluster analyses and nearest neighbour procedures, together with DNA characteristics, behaviour and nesting. This review presents a unified and coherent account of the Asian honeybees, based on the advances of the last three decades.