Drone honey bees are disproportionately sensitive to abiotic stressors despite expressing high levels of stress response proteins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drone honey bees (Apis mellifera) are the obligate sexual partners of queens, and the availability of healthy, high-quality drones directly affects a queen's fertility and productivity. Yet, our understanding of how stressors affect adult drone fertility, survival, and physiology is presently limited. Here, we investigated sex biases in susceptibility to abiotic stressors (cold stress, topical imidacloprid exposure, and topical exposure to a realistic cocktail of pesticides). We found that drones (haploid males) were more sensitive to cold and imidacloprid exposure than workers (sterile, diploid females), but the cocktail was not toxic at the concentrations tested. We corroborated this lack of cocktail toxicity with in-hive exposures via pollen feeding. We then used quantitative proteomics to investigate protein expression profiles in the hemolymph of topically exposed workers and drones, and found that 34 proteins were differentially expressed in exposed drones relative to controls, but none were differentially expressed in exposed workers. Contrary to our hypothesis, we show that drones express surprisingly high baseline levels of putative stress response proteins relative to workers. This suggests that drones' stress tolerance systems are fundamentally rewired relative to workers, and susceptibility to stress depends on more than simply gene dose or allelic diversity.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".