About the Authors

M. Sydney Miller

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Mary.S.Miller@uvm.edu

Affiliation Agriculture, Landscape, and Environment Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America

Dawn Boncristiani

Contributed equally to this work with: Dawn Boncristiani, Jay Evans, P. Alexander Burnham, Cailin Barrett, Samantha A. Alger

Roles Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation USDA Beltsville Honey Bee Research Lab, Beltsville, Maryland, United States of America

Jay Evans

Contributed equally to this work with: Dawn Boncristiani, Jay Evans, P. Alexander Burnham, Cailin Barrett, Samantha A. Alger

Roles Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation USDA Beltsville Honey Bee Research Lab, Beltsville, Maryland, United States of America

P. Alexander Burnham

Contributed equally to this work with: Dawn Boncristiani, Jay Evans, P. Alexander Burnham, Cailin Barrett, Samantha A. Alger

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Agriculture, Landscape, and Environment Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America, Biology Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America

Cailin Barrett

Contributed equally to this work with: Dawn Boncristiani, Jay Evans, P. Alexander Burnham, Cailin Barrett, Samantha A. Alger

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Agriculture, Landscape, and Environment Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America

Kaira Wagoner

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Biology Department, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, United States of America

Samantha A. Alger

Contributed equally to this work with: Dawn Boncristiani, Jay Evans, P. Alexander Burnham, Cailin Barrett, Samantha A. Alger

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Agriculture, Landscape, and Environment Department, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, United States of America

Competing Interests

I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: KW is the co-inventor of the UBeeO assay and owner of Optera LLC, which developed and now sells UBeeO (Patent No. 11559045 (2023), Patent No. 10524455 (2020), and Patent No.10512251 (2019)). To avoid potential conflict of interest, KW did not collect or analyze any data presented in this study. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.