In recent years, there has been a fairly lively discussion about the existence of Carniolan bee ecotypes in various parts of Slovenia. Since the rough genotyping of samples from different areas did not show a clear structure of the population, in this task we combined the phenotypic and genetic assessment of two populations, from Gorenjska and Dolenjska. We tried to prove the differences between the populations on the selected material of the Carniolan bee. Morphometric methods were used to demonstrate differences between populations, haplotypes were determined by sequencing the tRNAleu - cox2 section of mitochondrial DNA and the population was compared based on 19 microsatellite loci. We found that locally preserved groups from Dolenjska and Gorenjska differ in the size of the bones, legs, heels and radial distance. They also differ in the wing angles D7, G18 and K19. The most useful features for finding differences between groups are: the length of the tibia of the first leg, the area of the baskets, the length of the hind leg, and the area of the wing. We found a typically positive correlation between hind leg length with first leg tibia size and wing size. In our case, it was seen that the cubital index is not the most useful property for finding differences between groups within a race. With the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, we came to the result that the mitochondrial haplotype C2C predominates in Gorenjska and the haplotype C2E in Dolenjska. The analysis of microsatellite loci indicated moderate genetic differentiation between the groups, the greatest distance being between breeding bees and bees of the locally preserved population from Gorenjska. We can distinguish between preserved populations and populations under the influence of human selection. The effect is observed in both morphological properties and microsatellite loci.
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