Physiological qualities of honey bee queens ( <i>Apis mellifera</i> ) overwintered in banks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the challenges of rearing honey bee queens (Apis mellifera) in a northern climate, the Canadian beekeeping industry relies on importing queens from other countries. Alternative strategies have been explored in recent years to increase Canadian self-sufficiency in queen supply. Studies have focused on assessing the feasibility of storing groups of queens in a colony (queen bank) over the winter, ensuring their availability in spring of the following year. This study aimed to investigate the impact of overwintering banked queens on their nutritional and reproductive physiological state, as well as their overall performance in colonies, compared to control queens wintered individually. Although banked queens had a lower mean survival rate during the winter season compared to control queens, there was significant variation in survival rates among different queen banks, ranging from 11% to 70%. Seven key reproductive and nutritional parameters were evaluated, including queen and ovary weight, abdominal index, sperm metrics, and protein levels. After wintering, there were no significant differences in these measured parameters between the groups. When overwintered queens were introduced into colonies the following spring, the colonies with banked queens had significantly less brood during the first month compared to control queens, but after 2 months, there was no difference between banked and control queens regarding brood production, number of frames of bees, or colonies’ weight gain. Our study shows that overwintering queens in banks of 40 does not have a significant impact on their nutritional and reproductive physiological parameters or overall performance in colonies.
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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".