Too Much Work, Not Enough Tarsi: Group Size Influences <I>Bombus impatiens</I> (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Worker Reproduction With Implications for Sublethal Pesticide Toxicity Assessments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As bumble bees may routinely forage on pesticide-treated plants, it is imperative to apply pesticides that pose minimal risk. Identifying such reduced-risk pesticides requires toxicity tests using biologically relevant and standardized exposure methods. Our goal was to develop a functional and reliable queen-less micro-colony method for determining the sublethal effects of pesticides on Bombus impatiens Cresson, a species for which further toxicity assessments are needed. Originally developed using Bombus terrestris (L.), this method involves isolating three workers and allowing them to establish and maintain a colony. The workers and brood can then be exposed to pesticides and various effects measured simultaneously. Our preliminary work indicated that B. impatiens workers were unable to reproduce under the micro-colony conditions developed for B. terrestris. In the current study, we focused on the potential role of group size in B. impatiens worker reproduction by placing groups of three or five sister workers together and assessing their ability to establish a colony and rear males to adulthood. While both groups oviposited and produced males, significantly more males emerged from micro-colonies of five workers. We conclude that group size affects B. impatiens worker reproduction, and this effect in bumble bees varies interspecifically. In the context of toxicity testing, we recommend the use of at least five B. impatiens workers in micro-colonies to ensure a level of reproduction that allows the detection of potential sublethal changes to reproduction or development.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".