Research Projects
The honey bee Apis mellifera, a world-wide distributed species, is an insect with enormous environmental and socio-economic importance. Traditional beekeeping has been playing important socio-economic roles in Ethiopia-a country of diverse ecosystems located in northeast Africa-where ranges of major evolutionary lineages of Apis mellifera adjoin; leading to controversial classifications. This project aims at disentangling Ethiopian honey bees in reference to global evolutionary lineages and neighboring subspecies using integrated methods of forewing geometric morphometrics, standard morphometrics, and genetic analyses; and identifying adaptation patterns across agro-ecological zones within the country.