Male and female bees show large differences in floral preference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Intraspecific variation in foraging niche can drive food web dynamics and ecosystem processes. Field studies and theoretical analysis of plant-pollinator interaction networks typically focus on the partitioning of the floral community between pollinator species, with little attention paid to intraspecific variation among plants or foraging bees. In other systems, male and female animals exhibit different, cascading, impacts on interaction partners. Although the foraging ecology of male bees is little known, we expect foraging preferences to differ between male and female bees, which could strongly impact plant-pollinator interaction outcomes. We designed an observational study to evaluate the strength and prevalence of sexually dimorphic foraging preferences in bees. We observed bees visiting flowers in semi-natural meadows in New Jersey, USA. To detect differences in flower use against a shared background resource availability, we maximized the number of interactions observed within narrow spatio-temporal windows. To distinguish observed differences in bee use of flower species, which can reflect abundance patterns and sampling effects, from underlying differences in bee preferences, we analyzed our data with both a permutation-based null model and random effects models. We found that the diets of male and female bees of the same species were often as dissimilar as the diets of bees of different species. Furthermore, we demonstrate differences in preference between male and female bees, and identify plant species that are particularly attractive to each sex. We show that intraspecific differences in preference can be robustly identified within interactions between hundreds of species, without precisely quantifying resource availability, and despite high phenological turnover. Given the large differences in flower use and preference between male and female bees, ecological sex differences should be integrated into studies of bee demography, plant pollination, and coevolutionary relationships between flowers and insects.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".