Bumble bee colony health is diminished in a mesotunnel enclosure planted with a cucurbit monoculture crop
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of “mesotunnels” (mesh netting pest-exclusion structures) as a sustainable pest management strategy is increasing among organic vegetable growers. However, pollination management presents a challenge in this system, and little is known about how mesotunnels impact pollinator health. This study examines bee colony health in mesotunnels, using commercial Bombus impatiens colonies in cucurbit crop mesotunnels as a relevant model system in a two-year experiment. To assess colony-level health, we combined several variables into “colony health indices” that produce summary values of the somatic (related to pollination service delivery, including number of workers, worker and nest mass, and stored pollen and nectar), reproductive (related to sexual reproduction, including number of immatures, drones, and queen size), and overall colony health (including all variables in somatic and reproductive indices). We found that in 2023 B. impatiens colonies in a cucurbit mesotunnel foraging environment had worse reproductive health and overall health than free-foraging colonies, but performed similarly in their somatic health. In several measurements, colonies from mesotunnels performed similarly to colonies with no foraging access. Our results suggest that commercial colonies in mesotunnel environments are not compromised in their potential to provide crop pollination services, but are compromised in their ability to reproduce and persist year-over-year. Our colony health indices could be adapted to assess the status of reproduction and ecosystem service delivery for social bees.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".