Fending for Thyself: Honey Bees From Ethiopia Inflict Physical Damage on <i>Varroa destructor</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor and its associated viruses threaten the health of honey bee ( Apis mellifera L.). Yet, African populations survive mite infestations without miticide treatment largely due to social immunity behaviors. However, little is known about these defense mechanisms in A. m. simensis populations from the Amhara region of Ethiopia. Therefore, this study investigated grooming and hygienic behaviors across lowland, midland, and highland areas during the wet and dry seasons in this region. Grooming behavior was quantified by measuring adult mite infestation rates, daily natural mite fall, and the proportion of mites showing physical damage per colony. Hygienic behavior was evaluated via the removal of pin‐killed brood cells. Results were compared with Kenya's resistant A. m. scutellata and susceptible European hybrids in the USA. Honey bees in the Amhara region maintained low mite infestations (< 3.5 mites/100 honey bees) and exhibited higher grooming rates, ranging between 15% to 43% and inflicted more frequently damage to legs and gnathosoma comparable to Kenya's resistant honey bees. In addition to the 10 previously known damage categories inflicted on the mites by honey bees, two new mite damage combinations were identified. Their hygienic behavior was also high, ranging between 79.9% to 98.6% within 24 h and reached 98.8% to 100% after 48 h. While adult grooming and hygienic behaviors significantly varied with landscape and/or season, neither significantly correlated with mite infestation loads, suggesting these traits confer tolerance rather than resistance. Other resistance mechanisms, such as suppressed mite reproduction in worker brood cells, may further reduce colony mite infestations and should be evaluated in future studies.
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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".