Foraging preferences of bumble bee castes are weakly related to plant species cover on two arable agri-environment habitat types
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arable field margins provide important floral resources for insect foragers. This study assessed the significance of cultivated margins and floristically enhanced margins, both English agri-environment scheme (AES) options, to foraging bumble bees (Bombus species). We examined plant foraging preferences in each habitat according to species and caste. Additionally, detailed botanical surveys were carried out to determine vascular plant densities on the study margins. Overall, our results emphasised the importance of spontaneous (Asteraceae) species emerging from the seed bank in the provision of forage across Bombus species and castes, and highlighted that Bombus foraging preferences appeared to be only weakly related to floral species densities. Although found only occasionally in high densities, the popularity of these dicots was likely due to high nectar sugar mass. Bombus queens were recorded relatively infrequently, implying that these habitats are failing to provide the preferred floral resources of all Bombus spp. queens. Queens that were observed were found to favour earlier-flowering species (e.g. Anchusa arvensis) and species with longer corollas (e.g. Vicia sativa). Worker bees across Bombus spp. showed high overlap in plant preferences (e.g. Cirsium arvense, Ononis spinosa). However, some variability in preferences between castes within a species were noted, for example, only B. terrestris/lucorum drones were found to forage on Crepis vesicaria in cultivated margins. Additionally, bumble bee abundance was only found to increase as dicot cover increased. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of continuing to utilise multiple AES types in order to fully support Bombus and other pollinating insect populations on farmland.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".