A scientific note on the drone flight time of Apis mellifera capensis and A. m. scutellata

Abstract

The honeybees of South Africa, the Cape honeybee Apis mellifera capensis and the African honeybee Apis mellifera scutellata are separated by a zone of overlap situated mainly within the Great Karoo ecotone (Hepburn and Crewe, 1991). The exact nature of this zone of overlap is unclear, but neither subspecies appears to be able to increase its range, despite capensis’s ability to become a social parasite of other honeybee subspecies (Allsopp, 1992) and scutellata’s potential for invasiveness (Winston, 1992). This status quo (Hepburn and Radloff, 1998) may be due to an asynchrony of mating flight times. Here we test the hypothesis that scutellata and capensis have offset mating flight times by comparing the flight times of drones of the two subspecies at a single locality in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa.