81 ACTA ZOOLOGICA BULGARICA Acta zool. bulg., Suppl. 4, 2012: 81-88 Introduction Honey bee, Apis mellifera L., has adapted to a wide variety of ecosystems and at the present moment about 26 subspecies and numerous ecotypes have been described, based upon behaviour, morphology, and molecular evidence. Europe is home to 10 of the 26 currently existing subspecies, including two of the most frequently used subspecies in commercial beekeeping worldwide (RuttnER 1988, MEixnER et al. 2009). the biodiversity of honey bees of Europe and the conservation status of European subspecies have been recently reviewed in detail by DE La Rúa et al. (2009). the original range of the black bee A. mellif- era mellifera extends from the alps and Carpathians to the latitude of 60°n, from the atlantic seashore of Western Europe eastward to the urals but today the distribution of this subspecies is much reduced. in many Central and northern European countries (such as Germany, austria, Denmark and Sweden) these bees have hybridised much with A. m. ligus- tica and A. m. carnica. the extensive populations of this subspecies still exist in Great Britain, France, Switzerland and Poland (MEixnER et al. 2009). the original range of ‘Carniolan bee’ A. m. carnica extends across Central and Eastern Europe. this subspecies is spread on the territory of austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, albania, Serbia, Hungary and Romania. Due to its commer- Allozyme Variability in Populations of A. mellifera mellifera (Linnaeus 1758.), A. m. carnica (Pollman, 1879) and A. m. caucasica (Gorbachev, 1916) from Poland Evgeniya Ivanova 1 , Malgorzata Bienkowska 2 , Beata Panasiuk 2 , Jerzy Wilde 3 , Teodora Staykova 1 , Ivan Stoyanov 1 1 Section of Genetics, Department of Developmental Biology, Paisii Hilendarski Plovdiv university 2 Research institute of Horticulture, apiculture Division, 24-100 Pulawy, Poland 3 apiculture Division, Warmia and Mazury university, Sloneczna 48, 10-710 Olsztyn, Poland Abstract: the genetic variability in honey bee populations of three subspecies reared in Poland (A. m. mellifera, A. m. carnica and A. m. caucasica) has been studied by usage of allozymic analysis of six enzymic systems (MDH-1, ME, ESt-3, aLP, PGM and HK) corresponding to 6 loci. all loci were found to be polymorphic in the populations studied. two alleles were detected at ME locus, three alleles – at MHD-1, aLP, PGM and HK, and ive alleles – at EST-3 loci. The most frequent and the private alleles were discussed as suitable genetic markers for the subspecies characterization. the observed and expected heterozygosities (H o and H e ) ranged from 0.233 (A. m. carnica) to 0.311 (A. m. mellifera) and from 0.268 (A. m. carnica) to 0.327 (A. m. caucasica), respectively. allele frequencies of all loci were used to estimate nEi’s (1972) genetic distance, which was found to range from 0.025 (between A. m. carnica populatons) to 0.518 (between A. m. cauca- sica and A. m. mellifera populations). the estimated mean F St value from allozyme data was 0.28. uPGMa and neighbour-Joining phylogenetic dendrograms were obtained by genetic distance matrix methods. the studied A. m. mellifera, A. m. carnica and A. m. caucasica populations were grouped in different clusters. Key words: Apis mellifera, allozymes, genetic variability, Poland