Evidence for geographic variation in colony social organization in an obligately social sweat bee, <i>Lasioglossum malachurum</i> Kirby (Hymenoptera; Halictidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expression of altruism and colony eusociality are both a matter of degree in social sweat bees. Even in obligately social species, variation in these traits may be observed across a species' range. Lasioglossum (Evylaeus) malachurum (Kirby) is an obligately eusocial sweat bee found across Europe. In western Europe, L. malachurum exhibits north-south clines of increasing colony size associated with the production of more worker broods, and worker production of males, but societies conform to the model of a classically eusocial hymenopteran insect. A population of L. malachurum studied from 1994 to 1998 at Agios Nikolaos Monemvasias in southern Greece exhibits a startlingly different type of social structure. Dissections of female bees collected while foraging on flowers or from excavations of nests showed that the majority of mid- to late-summer workers are mated and (or) have developing ovaries, indicating that some workers are highly reproductive. Nest excavations indicated that in many or most colonies, the queen has disappeared by midsummer, before ovipositing the final, reproductive brood. In orphan nests, workers become the major reproductives, which suggests that males and gynes in the final brood are the offspring of workers. The very long breeding season in southern Greece may explain why colonies often outlive their queen. The result is the expression of a multivoltine colony cycle and a behavioural switch from eusocial to semisocial colony organization.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".