A bumble bee in a haystack: chance observation of an overwintering rusty patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis (Hymenoptera:Apidae) gyne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bombus affinis (rusty-patched bumble bee) Cresson is listed as a federally endangered species in the United States and Canada. It is globally “imperiled” (G2) and listed as “critically endangered” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. While the causes of the species’ precipitous decline are relatively unknown, researchers suspect introduced pathogens, habitat loss and degradation, competition with non-native bees, and climate change. Conservation strategies should encompass all aspects of the species’ life cycle. However, habitat selection of new overwintering gynes (gynes become queens when they establish nests in the spring) is the least understood. Here we document the first observation of an overwintering B. affinis gyne in an urban deciduous forest in Madison, Wisconsin. The gyne was discovered on a slight north, northeast facing slope within the top 5 cm of loose soil and under a layer of Acer saccharum, Quercus sp., and Tsuga canadensis leaf litter. We mapped the landcovers within 1 km and 2 km around the observed overwintering location as the potential foraging range that a newly emerged queen would encounter the following spring. While only a single observation, this chance encounter adds to the knowledge of overwintering habitat requirements and increases our understanding of the land cover types that B. affinis queens might encounter within the foraging range of the overwintering site, especially those within a highly urbanized landscape. Observations such as this can inform conservation and recovery efforts for the imperiled B. affinis.
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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".