Williams & Hernandez 2000
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Williams, P. & Hernández, L. M. Mai 2000: Distinguishing females of the bumble bees Bombus ruderatus (F.) from Bombus hortorum (L.) in Britain: a preliminary application of quantitative techniques. In: Report to the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Bumblebee Working Group. (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/bombus/Williams00_rarity.pdf).
Zusammenfassung: This study examined the British bumble bees Bombus ruderatus and B. hortorum to assess which characters might be used to give the best discrimination between females of the two taxa. The approach taken was to apply quantitative methods, in order to provide explicit and accountable comparisons. The first stage of the analysis examined queens to identify which of 30 morphological and pubescence characters might be most promising. The second stage then sought to assess which of the subset of 13 promising characters worked best with a larger sample of the workers, which are more difficult to distinguish. Although these characters showed statistically significant differences between taxa, many of them showed poor discriminatory power. However, a combination of two morphological characters, the breadth of the head and the length of the malar area, was found to distinguish most queens of the two taxa. This combination has not been used before, and for our sample showed an improved discrimination (90% individuals non-overlapping) compared to some of the most popular traditional characters (39% non-overlapping).
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