Impacts of indoor mass storage of two densities of honey bee queens (<i>Apis mellifera</i>) during winter on queen survival, reproductive quality and colony performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spring imports of queen honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are essential to replace winter colony losses in Canada, but contribute to the spread of treatment-resistant strains of pathogens and undesirable genetic traits. A possible alternative to these imports is the mass storage of queens during winter. By overwintering a strong colony (queen bank) containing large numbers of mated queens isolated in cages, beekeepers could acquire local queens early in the spring. In this study, we tested the efficacy of overwintering queen banks at two different queen densities (40 and 80). In the 40-queen banks (40 QB), 74.2% of queens survived the 6-month overwintering period, while 42.1% of queens survived in the 80-queen banks (80 QB). When compared to queens overwintered free in their colony, queens from bank colonies were smaller and lighter in early spring but had similar sperm viability and sperm count. Overwintering queens in banks did not have an impact on their acceptance in a nucleus colony but reduced their oviposition in the initial weeks following their introduction. After several days in nucleus colonies, queens from banks had regained a size and weight similar to that of queens overwintered normally, suggesting that they could perform well over a complete beekeeping season. This study achieved promising results and highlights the potential of this technique for the beekeeping industry in Canada and worldwide.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".