Nest observations reveal hygienic nest architecture and behavior in an Arctic bumble bee species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many bumble bee species are declining worldwide. Disease and habitat loss are two contributors to these declines, yet little is known about disease transmission within bumble bee colonies or bumble bee nesting habitat requirements. These gaps are especially wide for Arctic species, as prior bumble bee research focuses disproportionately on the contiguous United States, southern Canada, and Europe. Here, we describe the nesting habitat, spatial distribution, and nest architecture of 10 frigid bumble bee (Bombus frigidus) nests found in the low Arctic in western Alaska. In these nests, we observed a novel nest architecture, the “outhouse,” that consisted of an additional subterranean cavity containing concentrated fecal materials and observed that the bees continued to defecate in one or a few locations outside of the main nest cavity when transplanted to the laboratory. Finally, we measured fecal‐borne trypanosome parasites in frigid bumble bee workers in this region. Together, our findings provide natural history information on this Arctic bee species and suggest that the outhouse architecture could function as a social immunity trait to reduce the transmission of fecal‐borne pathogens within the nest.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".