Computerised Bee Wing Morphology

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Now

New Version
2012

Morphology - or the study of form and structure - is one way to differentiate species and sub species of living organisms. This can be applied to honey bees to check the degree of hybridization and select the best breeding stock. More information on this method is available at www.bibba.com.

Where honey bee wings are concerned the challenge for most beekeepers is to measure two properties known as cubital index and discoidal shift.

Cubital Index is the ratio of the lengths of two veins on edges of the cubital cells
Discoidal Shift is an angle showing how a vein junction (the discoidal point) is shifted towards or away from the wingtip relative to other vein junctions.

My introduction to this subject was from a beekeeper friend who showed me how he was trying to use graphic software to measure scanned bee wings and complained that "There must be an easier way".

As a result I have produced a computer program to simplify collection and analysis of data for the computerised method of honey bee wing morphometry. It automates the collection of data as you click on points on the bee wing scan and automatically exports the data to an analysis spreadsheet which calculates cubital index and discoidal shift and plots graphs of these.

This program is the easier way!

The trial version of the progam can be downloaded from this page. Minimum system requirements are 486DX4100MHz, 16MB RAM 6MB Free hard disc space and Windows 95.

Updated Version

The program has now been updated to work better with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Although it did work it sometimes needed some fiddling to make it work. The latest version should work with all versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 7. You may need to alter security settings in Excel to allow it to run macros.

The program is free for thirty days, if you wish to continue using the program after this you will need to register the program at the special introductory price of £25 (25 UK pounds).

For the analysis you will also need a spreadsheet program that can use Excel spreadheets. The spreadsheet included with the package is in Excel 97 format.

See how the program looks

See how the analysis looks

Following a request for a graph that would show bee wings that were "off the scale" in the original analysis I have produced an alternative spreadsheet showing the information in a slightly different way. See how the alternative analysis looks.

Download

Download the Beemorph program (approx 2.3MB)

Download a sample scan to test (approx 0.5MB)

Download an alternative analysis (approx 350KB)

Installation

Save the bemozip.exe file and run it to extract the program setup files to a temporary directory. Then run the program setup file. After successful setup the temporary files can be deleted.

Installation seems to cause some difficulties so I have added some more detailed instructions.

If you have difficulty please let me know so that the program can be improved.

Further Information

If you would like to know more about the program you may want to look at the help documents.

Introduction

Scanning

Using the Program

Analysing the data

Registration

System Requirements