A phylogenetic analysis of Black Queen Cell Virus demonstrating viral spread across native and wild bees in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Native and managed pollinators are vital to Canada's agriculture and biodiversity; however, these species are currently facing population declines. One of the most prominent viruses affecting the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is Black Queen Cell Virus (BQCV), which is fatal to developing honey bee queens. Previous genomic analyses have shown that interspecies transmission of pathogens is common between managed honey bees and wild bumblebees, while the BQCV genotypes tend to be most similar within the geographic site where they were collected. The objective of this study is to trace the spread of BQCV across Apis and native bee species within Canada to better understand viral transmission in pollinators. Bees were collected from sites across Ontario, Alberta, and Nova Scotia and were tested for BQCV. Viral RNA was extracted and PCR was used to amplify viral cDNA targeting the helicase gene. PCR products were sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq Next-Generation Sequencing platform and sequences were analyzed for genetic similarity. Phylogenetic analysis revealed evidence of viral transmission across species and across collection sites. The viral sequences did not cluster neatly by province, though when compared to internationally collected sequences, they did cluster by country. These results suggest pathogen spillover between managed and native bee species across Canada, and that infected wild bees act as carriers for viral transmission even when appearing asymptomatic. Broader genomic analyses are needed to explore the transmission of BQCV across Canada, as the global data set remains limited.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".