Automatic determination of landmark coordinates for honey bee forewing venation using a new MATLAB-based tool

In this study, a novel and free-to-use MATLAB-based tool (WingMarks) is presented, aimed at facilitating the geometric morphometric analysis of honey bee forewing venation through automatic recognition of vein junctions. Firstly, the ability of the new software to analyze wing images obtained by different optical equipment was evaluated. Even when a low-end USB-microscope was used for image collection, it reached 100% precision in the automatic detection of the landmarks for 87% of the samples, and most of failures corresponded to a single point and were easily corrected. The measurement error of WingMarks software was studied through repeated analysis of the same wing image, evincing that landmark determination was highly repeatable, even higher than that of widely used tpsDig manual software. In addition, a field test with 720 specimens from three subspecies (A. m. iberiensis, A. m. ligustica, and A. m. carnica) and from hybrid Buckfast bees, collected from 90 different colonies, was conducted. In conju...