The goal of this paper is to report on the development of an ontology-based taxonomic key application that is a first deliverable of a larger project that has as goal the development of ontology-driven computing solutions for problems experienced in taxonomy. The ontology-based taxonomic key was developed from a complex taxonomic data set, namely the Catalogue of Afrotropical Bees. The key is used to identify the genera of African bees and for this paper we developed an ontology-based application, that demonstrates that morphological key data can be captured effectively in a standardised format as an ontology, and furthermore, even though the ontology-based key provides the same identification results as the traditional key, this approach allows for several additional advantages that could support taxonomy in the biological sciences. The morphology ontology for Afrotropical bees, as well as the key application form the basis of a suite of tools that we intend to develop to support the taxonomic processes in this domain.