Morphometrics of Intraspecific Populations of Stingless Bee Tetragonula iridipennis Smith from Southern Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Stingless bees also referred to as meliponine bees and morphological characteristics of these differ depending on are the species and environmental kinds. The current study explores morphology and morphometrics of Tetragonula iridipennis Smith in Tamil Nadu, India. The morphometrics of worker bees were compared over locations. The bees captured in the Kolli hills were significantly larger than those collected elsewhere. The mean value of head length (HL) (1.43 mm), head width (HW) (1.68 mm), antennal length (AL) (1.98 mm), hind leg length (HLL) (3.54 mm) and forewing length (FL) (3.84 mm) were recorded. The results revealed variance of four principal components (PC) reaching 82.4%, as (PC1) 38.58%, (PC2) 20.95%, (PC 3) 19.75% and (PC4) 8.10%. The characters of FL, HW, FW (forewing width), HLL, AL, OOD (ocello ocular distance), HTW (hind tibial width) and HL were the most discriminative in the principal component analysis.