Consumption of Supplemental Spring Protein Feeds by Western Honey Bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Colonies: Effects on Colony Growth and Pollination Potential
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adequate nutrition is required to support productive honey bee colonies, therefore beekeepers supplement colonies with additional protein at targeted time points. We tested the effects of commercially available protein feeds in spring, in advance of colonies being used for hybrid canola pollination. The feed treatments across the three-year study included the following patty types: Global 15% pollen, Global 0% pollen, Bee Pollen-Ate, FeedBee, and Healthy Bees, as well as an unsupplemented control in year two of the study only. The amount of feed consumed varied among colonies, treatments, date, and year. Similarly, there were also differences in feed efficiency (bees reared per gram of feed consumed), likely due to the relative availability of external forage sources to supplement the feed provided. Unsupplemented colonies were able to rear less brood, and subsequently had fewer adult bees than supplemented colonies, in an apiary where pollen was not abundant. Differences in consumption among treatments often failed to translate in to differences in amount of brood reared or subsequent adult population. All the protein feed treatments contained all ten amino acids essential to honey bees, however lysine and arginine were below the optimal proportion required for growth in all patties except the FeedBee patty. The amount of protein and amount and types of sugars and fats in the products also varied among product type and batch. The results of this study demonstrate a benefit to supplementary spring protein feeding to increase honey bee colony populations in advance of a summer pollination market.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".