Innovative Airborne DNA Approach for Monitoring Honey Bee Foraging and Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Environmental DNA (eDNA) refers to genetic material collected from the environment and not directly from an organism. eDNA is best known as a tool in aquatic ecology but has been found associated with almost every substrate examined including soils, surfaces, and riding around on other animals. The collection of eDNA from air is one of the most recent advances and has been used to monitor a variety of organisms, including plants, animals, and microorganisms. Current evidence suggests a high turnover rate providing a recent signal for the presence of DNA associated with an organism. Here, we test whether material carried in air can be collected from honey bee hives to evaluate recent foraging behavior and colony health. We sampled air using purpose built “bee safe” air filters operating for 5–6 h at each colony. We successfully recovered plant, fungal and microbial DNA from the air within hives over a 3‐week pilot period. From these data we identified the core honey bee microbiome and plant interaction data representing foraging behavior. We calculated beta diversity to estimate the effects of apiary sites and sampling date on data recovery. We observed that variance in ITS data was influenced by sampling date. Given that honey bees are generalist pollinators our ability to detect temporal signals in associated plant sequence data suggest this method opens new avenues into the ecological analysis of short term foraging behavior at the colony level. In comparison variance in microbial 16S sequencing data was more influenced by sampling location. As the assessment of colony health needs to be localized, spatial variance in these data indicate this may be an important tool in detecting infection. This pilot study demonstrates that colony air filtration has strong potential for the rapid screening of honey bee health and for the study of bee behavior.
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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".