The effect of food supplementation on reproductive success in bumblebee field colonies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food availability is a major component of habitat quality. For bumblebee field colonies, it is unknown to what extent reproductive success is limited by food availability relative to other factors such as parasites. To assess the importance of food availability, we carried out a field experiment in the Quebec City area, Canada, in 1999 and 2000, using 45 colonies of Bombus impatiens and B. ternarius . Colonies whose nectar and pollen supplies were increased regularly throughout the season reached larger sizes (in number of workers) and had a higher reproductive success than controls, by 51% and 86% respectively. In particular, food supplementation increased the number of males produced and the probability of producing gynes (young queens). The sex ratio was highly skewed in favour of males overall, and the relative proportion of gynes increased with food supplementation in B. ternarius , but not in B. impatiens . These results suggest that colonies ensure reproduction by producing some males and, given the opportunity (sufficient food availability), will produce gynes. Possible reasons for the increased success of food supplemented colonies are explored. However, despite some clear advantages of having larger food supplies such as the build‐up of larger worker populations, food supplementation did not appear to help colonies defend themselves against macroparasites because experimental and control colonies experienced similar levels of parasitism by Psithyrus , Fannia canicularis , Brachicoma devia and Vitula edmandsae .
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".