The desert bees (Apis mellifera L) of Libya

Abstract

Apis mellifera is endemic to Africa, Europe and western Asia. Its biogeography was addressed based on morphomtery. There was a gap of the biogeography in North Africa. In this thesis honeybee populations of A. mellifera in Saharan and coastal locations in Libya were investigated, morphologically and using mitochondrial DNA, to fill this gap. It is proved that the Libyan honeybees are distinctly different from both the adjacent A. m. intermissa bee populations of western northern Africa and those of A. m. lamarckii of Egypt in respect of morphology and mtDNA haplotypes. But more similar morphologically to A. m. sahariensis, suggesting that those populations might be derived from a formerly extended Saharan honeybee population during the Holocene pluvial. In spite of large imports of A. m. ligustica these apparently had minor impact on the endemic Libyan honeybee populations. Moreover, a contact zone between the evolutionary lineages A and O was identified in northwestern Libya. It was proven that the honeybee population of the Saharan oasis Kufra is isolated from the other locations for thousands years. In this thesis I presented a tool kit of 18 microsatellite DNA markers comprising a set of six unlinked loci, and three sets of four tightly linked loci which can be run in two multiplex PCR reactions. It was proven to be most effective in determining the number of colonies in a honeybee population, the parentage of workers in a colony and the mother genotypes of drones sampled in the wild.