Manipulating pollen supply in honey bee colonies during the fall does not affect the performance of winter bees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Each fall, honey bee ( Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae)) colonies in northern temperate regions rear a population of long-lived winter bees that maintains a broodless nest throughout the winter and resumes brood-rearing activities in the spring. Pollen supply in colonies is closely tied to this phenomenon; winter bees sequester large reservoirs of pollen-derived nutrients in their bodies and the brood-rearing capacity of colonies is dictated by the availability of pollen. We determined the effects of manipulating pollen supply during the fall on the number of winter bees present in colonies by spring, their mass and protein content before and after winter, and their capacity to rear brood during the spring. Colonies were either supplemented with or partially deprived of pollen during the fall, while a third group of colonies was not manipulated (control). We found that the performance of winter bees was not enhanced by supplementing colonies with pollen in the fall, nor did worker function suffer if pollen supply was restricted. Similar numbers of winter bees survived to spring in colonies and workers had similar physiology and brood-rearing efficiencies. These results suggest that beekeepers would not benefit by investing in fall pollen supplements to maximize colony growth in early spring.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".