Efficacy of Nest Boxes for Wild Bumblebees as a Supplemental Pollination Strategy in Highbush Blueberry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Commercial highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum L) growers use managed honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies as the primary pollination strategy, yet in many respects wild bumblebee species (Bombus spp. L) are better suited. Studies on the use of nest boxes to augment wild bumblebee populations are limited and have focused solely on nest box occupation, without determining whether there is any subsequent increase in bumblebee visitation to flowers in the field. This two-year study evaluated the use of nest boxes in blueberry production systems in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia (BC), Canada. I measured both nest box occupation as well as the rate of bumblebee visitation on flowers and the impact of land use on both outcomes. I found 10% nest box occupation in 2022 and 18% occupation in 2023. Semi-natural habitat had a contrasting effect on both box occupation and in-field observations. Occupied boxes had a positive effect on bumblebee observations in 2023 when there were fewer bees present overall, pointing to potential for mitigating pollination deficits.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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".