J. APIC. SCI. Vol. 66 No. 1 2022 J. APIC. SCI. Vol. 66 No. 1 2022 67 MORPHOMETRIC AND GENETIC CHARACTERIZATION OF HONEY BEES (APIS MELLIFERA L.) FROM THRACE REGION OF TURKEY Fulya Özdil 1 * Devrim Oskay 2 Raziye Işık 2 Selen Yatkın 2 Abdurrahman Aydın 3 Ahmet Güler 3 Abstract A detailed morphological and genetic characterization of honey bees from the Thrace and west Anatolian regions of Turkey was surveyed. A total of 1650 worker bee samples (110 colonies) were evaluated with the forty-one morphological characters and 217 honey bee samples were analyzed via DNA sequencing of the tRNA leu -cox2 region. In this study, three different populations, Thrace (Tekirdağ, Kırklareli and Edirne provinces), Island Gökçeada, and western Anatolia were formed based on morphometrics, since the Marmara Sea has taken a very strong barrier role in this formation. The morphological similarity of the Thrace population was supported by the genetic analysis. The sequencing of the tRNA leu -cox2 region revealed twenty-two different haplotypes, sixteen of which are novel. The C2d, macedonica-like haplotype, was the most widely found haplotype (48%) all around the Thrace region. Along with the C2d haplotype, previously published C2s, C2v, C2i, C2j, and C2h haplotypes, and the newly found haplotypes were also observed but less frequently. In this study, Thrace honey bees were found to more similar to A. m. macedonica through the mtDNA sequence analysis, whereas carnica-like honey bees were only found near the Istranca mountain ridges, Kırklareli province and macedonica-like honey bees all around the Thrace region. According to our results, some of the Thrace honey bee populations may be both A. m. carnica and A. m. macedonica but the assignment to the latter subspecies seems more likely due to its geographic range. Keywords: Apis mellifera, DNA sequencing, morphometrics, thrace honey bees, tRNA leu -Cox2 gene 1 Bioengineering, Istanbul Medeniyet University / Agricultural Biotechnology, Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University, Turkey 2 Agricultural Biotechnology, Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University, Turkey 3 Animal Science, Ondokuzmayıs University, Turkey INTRODUCTION The western honey bee, Apis mellifera L., has a wide distribution in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Since Ruttner’s morphological clas- sifcation of twenty-fve taxonomic groups (subspecies) of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) (Ruttner, 1988), twenty-nine recognized subspecies of Apis mellifera has been identifed with the addition of newly described subspecies including A. m. ruttneri from Malta (Sheppard et al., 1997), A. m. pomonella from Central Asia (Sheppard & Meixner, 2003), A. m. simensis from Ethiopia (Meixner et al., 2011) and Apis mellifera sinisxinyuan Xinyuan bees from China (Chen et al., 2016). These subspecies are now typically divided into four major groups, supported by morphometric and molecular studies: A lineage in Africa, M lineage in western and northern Europe, C lineage in eastern Europe and O lineage in the Middle East and Western Asia (Garnery et al., 1992; Whitfeld et al., 2006; Oleksa et al., 2011; Han et al., 2012; Péntek-Zakar et al., 2015). The existence of a *corresponding author: fulya.ozdil@medeniyet.edu.tr, fozdil@nku.edu.tr Received: 22 September 2021; accepted: 24 March 2022 DOI: 10.2478/JAS-2022-0005 DOI: 10.2478/JAS-2022-0005 Original Article J. APIC. SCI. VOL. 66 NO. 1 2022 J. APIC. SCI. VOL. 66 NO. 1 2022