Mercury accumulation in honey bees trends upward with urbanization in the USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urbanization has profound implications for associated ecosystems and organisms. Monitoring pollutants inform risk assessments for human and wildlife health. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) forage widely and collect food from many sources. Thus, they may be a robust integrator of environmental pollutants. Here, we collected honey bees from 10 different locations across the United States to quantify their content of total mercury (THg) and methylmercury (MeHg). Although our limited sample size prevented a meaningful statistical evaluation, we found that bees from urbanized areas had higher THg than those from rural areas, with suburban samples intermediate. The MeHg concentrations in all samples were below the detection limit. Despite its limited scope, this first preliminary dataset on Hg levels in honey bees across the United States suggests that urbanization may play a role in increasing Hg exposure to these pollinators, and that honey bees may be a useful biomonitor of the environmental presence of chemical pollutants.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".