Taxonomic Revision and Identification Keys for the Giant Honey Bees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The taxonomy and phylogeny of the giant honey bees ( Apis ; subgenus Megapis ) are still controversial and unresolved. The species boundaries within the subgenus are unclear and some species that are recognized on the basis of genetic differences lack supporting morphological characters. Two species are now well accepted: Apis dorsata F. of tropical regions of Asia and Apis laboriosa Smith that inhabits the foothills of Himalaya and neighboring mountain ranges. In addition, researchers have suggested that the two allopatric populations of giant honey bees that inhabit Sulawesi, Indonesia ( A. binghami Cockerell) and the oceanic Philippine islands ( A. breviligula Maa) as well as the South Indian form also deserve species status. We conducted a taxonomic study based on morphological characters of Megapis from throughout Asia. Our study confirms that Apis laboriosa is a distinct species based on numerous morphological characters. Moreover, A. dorsata of mainland Asia differs from the two island taxa based on coloration, ocellus size, and the spacing of compound eyes and ocelli. We found no evidence that breviligula of the Philippines has a distinctively short tongue, and report only one minor character (the shape of sternum 5) that differed statistically between bees from Sulawesi and the Philippines. We conclude that the bees from these islands represent a single morphological species, A. binghami , with two subspecies, A. b. binghami and A. b. breviligula . Apis dorsata from the Andaman Islands are smaller than but conspecific with those of mainland Asia. We found no morphological autapomorphies in the giant honey bees of southern India known to differ in mtDNA from A. dorsata from elsewhere in mainland Asia. We provide a taxonomic keys to workers and drones within the subgenus Megapis .
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".