Talk:Halictus rubicundus

Untitled
Hi all! I'm working on this page for a school project and would appreciate if you could keep up everything that I have worked on so far!

Thanks Sayabery (talk) 03:31, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sayabery, Flynnt2013. Peer reviewers: Courtney.cleveland, Junsang.cho, Mmc7777, Vsalazar258, Kulshrestha51.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:00, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Edit
I have added a lot of information to this page for my class. I have edited some of the existing information and extended it as well as adding sections in behavior and main headings at the end.

Thanks Flynnt2013 (talk) 04:03, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Review for class
This article is very well written and thorough in the knowledge that is presented. I helped correct some grammatical mistakes within the article. I was a bit confused with the subsection “Genetic Relatedness Within Colonies.” I did not understand how the the first brood of a foundress in a solitary colony are less genetically related than the first brood of a foundress in a social colony. Both broods should have the same genetic relatedness, so I don’t understand how this affects why the colony is social or solitary. Other than that, the article was clear and easy to understand but also insightful on its topic. Vsalazar258 (talk) 23:59, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Peer Edit
Hello! I am undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and I am editing this article for class purposes.

This article was very well written and since the person before me made a lot of the grammatical changes, there wasn’t much for me to change. One issue I had with the article was its topic diversity. The major topics that the article touches upon is behavior and kin selection. Besides these, there isn’t much about other topics which detracts from the knowledge of the bee. Consequently, I added more to the section on mating.

Mating: “Females within this species are not mobile, movements are very limited reducing gene flow, and males are faithful to their partners. Additionally, the average male lifespan of about a week or two, male faithfulness, the small population size of about 300 active individuals, there is nonrandom mate choice that occurs. Some examples of this behavior include learning to recognize odors of females through repeated exposure. A study done by Yanega in New York City suggests that a "within-group" mating structure is present within Halictus rubicundus creating a "partially isolated deme". As a result, these male bees exhibit local male competition for females and this leads to unintended social consequences.”

I also made some formatting changes that intend to increase the fluidity of the reading. I was very unsure of why the author included the section on “Genetic Relatedness among colonies of different behaviors” because the information presented doesn’t get very specific as to what species of bees the H. rubicundus are related to. All in all, the article was a good read.Junsang.cho (talk) 06:36, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Peer Review
I found it interesting that this species can be both solitary and eusocial depending on the climate it is found in. In your “Description and Identification” section, perhaps if you could find more information about their nests, you could create a separate “Nest” section. You could also include nest details in Distribution and Habitat. I really appreciated the details on the “Behavior” section – it was interesting to learn about the caste system in these bees when eusocial. I agree with the other reviewers, in that the “genetic relatedness among colonies of different behaviors” section under the “Genetic relatedness within colonies” could be reorganized. One way to do this could be to have an overarching section titled “Genetic Relatedness”, and then separate into “Eusocial” and “Solitary” behavior. Or, you could remove the subtitle. The other reviewers have also corrected the spelling/grammatical errors that could have been fixed. Additionally, I added the class banner to the talk page. I think you did a great job focusing on finding information about their behavior – it is such an interesting species to study because of its dual behaviors.

Here is my suggestion on how you could change the Genetic Relatedness section:

Genetic Relatedness within Colonies

Depending on the geographic location of the colony and its behavior, genetic relatedness within the colonies differs once again. There are colonies both of eusocial and solitary behavior that have been studied for environmental differences and genetics. It has been shown that there is a stronger link of genetic relatedness between two colonies with similar behavioral patterns, than those of closer geographic distance and different social behaviors.[4] This does not necessarily mean that social behavior is governed by certain genes, but it could be linked to certain genetic lineages that are more suited for certain environments.[4] Although there is much more studying that must be done on the correlation between genetics and the environment and social behavior, it has been recorded that there is some sort of link between the three parameters.[4] Evolutionary characteristics are involved in the crosslink between the northern populations of H. rubicundus having more solitary behavior, and the southern populations being eusocial.[4] It is a possibility, however, than this link was brought on by environmental control of sociality, rather than a purely genetic standpoint.[4]

At this point you could separate into solitary and eusocial behaviors.

Solitary behavior: In colonies in the north that exhibit solitary behavior, the genetic relatedness is different because the first brood does not yield worker bees who help the mother raise the following brood.[11] Therefore, there are no workers to help the mother and each of the gynes goes to establish its own nest, which means the colonies are not genetically related.[6] Eusocial behavior: In colonies that are established further south, where they practice eusocial behavior, they are genetically related within the colonies. For example, the first brood, which yields several workers, helps the foundress in her colony.[9] The first brood therefore stays in the colony, and is directly genetically related to the mother by half, and helps to raise the second brood, which is also related to them by half.[4]   Chtsai016 (talk) 03:17, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Peer review
I would recommend shortening the overview section. It’s a little long and I think the first paragraph could be added to the description. I liked the interesting fact that it adapts its behavior to the climate though. Maybe lead with that? I thought the colony cycle and division of labor sections were particularly good and informative. I was a little confused about what nest-site fidelity is. Maybe you could describe it a little more. Courtney.cleveland (talk) 15:16, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Peer review 2
This was an incredibly thorough article, touching many sections of behavior. The only addition I might recommend in terms of content would be sections addressing the bee's role as a pollinator or in agriculture, which would give the article additional relevance to humans. I went through and added several links in order to better integrate your article in Wikipedia and elucidate some terms. I also noticed that you sometimes repeat information several times, and those redundancies could be removed (for example, you mention that Halibuts rubicundus is a sweat bee three times, so I removed the instance in Description and identification). You also sometimes refer to an ambiguous source of authority, such as "It is believed" and "It is proposed." You should try to be clear on who is proposing a theory, or, if it is widely accepted, simply state the fact and cite your source. I tried to indicate instances of this that I noticed using the template. Finally, I made small grammar/punctuation corrections as well to clean up the overall flow of the article. I hope my corrections helped! Kulshrestha51 (talk) 00:11, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Additional Comments
Holistically, the article on Halictus rubicundus was well-written and easy to understand. There were a number of edits that I made to improve the grammar, content, and quality of the article. First, I linked the words “Halictus” and “Pleistocene” to their respective Wikipedia pages so that readers would have a better understanding of their taxonomy and the exact time period during which this bee invaded North America. The first sentence in the “colony” section reads: “The colony cycle of H. rubicundus is an annual cycle based on the seasonal schedule of hibernation and mating”. I re-phrased this sentence to become: “H. rubicundus’ annual colony cycle is dependent on hibernation and mating schedules,” which is slightly easier to read and understand. Furthermore, I also re-wrote the sentence: “As discussed in the sections about genetic relatedness, there are benefits to worker bee behaviors in eusocial colonies, as they are genetically related to the foundress and to next brood.” Proper grammar use necessitates that if a pronoun is used (in this case “they”) it must be clear who the subject is. By rephrasing the sentence to read: “As discussed in the section about genetic relatedness, there are benefits to worker bee behaviors in eusocial colonies, as workers are related to the foundress and the next brood,” it is clear that “they” refers to the workers, rather than the “benefits” or the “behaviors”. Lastly, I linked the words “philopatry” and “hymenopteran” under the “Behavior” section. The addition of a world map would have been beneficial so that readers can better understand where these bees are located. Mmc7777 (talk) 16:22, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Peer Review
I thought that your article was very well written and easy to follow. Previous peer editors have appeared to catch many of the minor edits needed to improve this article. I agree with other reviewers that perhaps in the future, a distribution map of the range of the species could be added so that readers can gain a visual on where these bees are located. You could rename the “nesting” structure to just “Nest structure and conditions” so that readers are not confused with the nesting behavior that you describe later in the article. Additionally the section titled “Genetic relatedness among colonies of different behaviors” might not have to be a sub-subsection, and could have the same time of header as the “genetic relatedness within colonies”. Perhaps you could also find another area to put the information in the section “Body size as a result of temperature”, it seems a little out of place, but this could just be my own opinion. Overall I can tell that the students that worked on this article put a lot of research and efforts into adding as much unbiased information about this bee as possible. Great work and I hope you are able to get “Good Article” status on this species. Chtsai016 (talk) 11:22, 4 December 2015 (UTC)