Queen honey bee (<i>Apis mellifera)</i> survival and colony performance after overwintering mated queens indoors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Honey bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae) winter colony mortality has reached sustained high levels and beekeepers depend on the availability of mated honey bee queens in early spring to recoup colony losses. Unfortunately, importing mated queens from other countries is currently the only reliable option meeting the demands of commercial beekeeping each spring in Canada. However, relying on queen imports brings another set of challenges, as supply chains can be disrupted, border crossings closed, imports prohibited, and the transportation of live animals can be stressful. This study explored the potential for Canadian beekeepers to supply queens in early spring by overwintering queens in queen banks that mated the previous summer. Queens were overwintered indoors in five queen banks. The following spring, the overwintered banked queens and a group of newly mated imported queens were introduced to colonies to evaluate queen introduction success and colony performance and survival over the following year. Queen survival in overwintered queen banks was low, with only 15% queen survival overall. Sperm viability of the banked queens prior to overwintering in queen banks was 30% higher than queens post-overwintering in queen banks. However, queen introduction success in the spring 2021, colony size, honey yield, and winter survival did not differ among queens that overwintered in queen banks and newly mated queens that were imported that spring. These results suggest banked overwintered queens have comparable performance to newly mated imported queens; although, overwintering mated queens in queen banks is risky, as entire queen banks can be lost, significantly reducing queen survival and the availability of mated queens in early spring.
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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".