Mite‐y bees: bumble bees ( <i>Bombus</i> spp., Hymenoptera: Apidae) host a relatively homogeneous mite (Acari) community, shaped by bee species identity but not by geographic proximity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1. Parasites can affect the communities of their hosts; and hosts, in turn, shape communities of parasites and other symbionts. This makes host–symbiont relationships a key but often overlooked aspect of community ecology. 2. Mites associated with bees have a range of lifestyles; however, little is known about mites associated with wild bees or about factors influencing the make‐up of bee‐associated mite communities. This study investigated how mite communities associated with bumble bees ( Bombus spp.) are shaped by the Bombus community and geographic proximity. 3. Bees were collected from 15 sites in Ontario, Canada, and examined for mites. Mite abundance and species richness increased with local bee abundance. Several bee species also differed in mite abundance, species richness, prevalence, and diversity. Locally uncommon species tended to have more mites than other bees. Queen bees had the most mites, and males had more mites than workers. 4. Spatial proximity was not a predictor of mite community composition, despite a strong effect of proximity on bee community similarity. 5. On the 11 Bombus spp. examined, 33 mite species were found. Whereas nearly half of these mite species are obligate associates of bumble bees, none was restricted to particular Bombus species. 6. The best predictor of mite community composition was bee identity. Although many parasite communities show strong geographic patterns, the communities of primarily commensalistic bee‐mites in this study did not. These findings have implications for bumble bee conservation, given that pollen‐feeding commensals might become harmful at high densities or act as disease vectors.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".