The brain atlas of a subsocial bee reflects that of eusocial Hymenoptera
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evolutionary transition from solitary life to group-living in a society with cooperative brood care, reproductive division of labor and morphological castes is associated with increased cognitive demands for task-specialization. Associated with these demands, the brains of eusocial Hymenoptera divide transcriptomic signatures associated with foraging and reproduction to different populations of cells and also show diverse astrocyte and Kenyon cell types compared with solitary non-hymenopteran insects. The neural architecture of subsocial bees, which represent evolutionary antecedent states to eusocial Hymenoptera, could then show how widely this eusocial brain is conserved across aculeate Hymenoptera. Using single-nucleus transcriptomics, we have created an atlas of neuron and glial cell types from the brain of a subsocial insect, the small carpenter bee (Ceratina calcarata). The proportion of C. calcarata neurons related to the metabolism of classes of neurotransmitters is similar to that of other insects, whereas astrocyte and Kenyon cell types show highly similar gene expression patterns to those of eusocial Hymenoptera. In the winter, the transcriptomic signature across the brain reflected diapause. When the bee was active in the summer, however, genes upregulated in neurons reflected foraging, while the gene expression signature of glia associated with reproductive functions. Like eusocial Hymenoptera, we conclude that neural components for foraging and reproduction in C. calcarata are compartmentalized to different parts of its brain. Cellular examination of the brains of other solitary and subsocial insects can show the extent of neurobiological conservation across levels of social complexity.
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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".