Hi Peter,
 
You write: "Recent work by Dave de Jong, et al, shows that pollen may not  
be the best food for bees after all. "
 
Surely 'best' is questionable here, unless we are happy to drive our bees  
toward complete reliance on us (domestication), and, the inevitable  
commensurate, the undermining of the health of any wild/feral bees they  come into 
contact with.  Many of us are not happy with that trend.  
 
To explain my thinking: those bees best able to make good use of the pollen 
 at any particular locality are best adapted to that environment.  The 
local  sub-species of bee best able to, for example, discriminate between those  
more toxic or indigestible pollens, and take good advantage of the 
flowering  timing, are, in a very important sense, the healthiest.  They can best  
flourish in that environment, and the 'best' food for them is that which they 
 discover, through natural selection, to be the stuff that suits them.
 
Of course an apiary can offer different foodstuffs, and time the feeding to 
 best advantage, but this comes at a cost: the way the apiary bees are 
attuned to  the local available forage will suffer.  In this way, feeding has  
similar results to medicating.  The apiary strains will become ever-more  
reliant on the beekeeper, and their genetic material will tend to disrupt the  
attunement of the local wild/feral bees.  In some settings this may not  
matter; but in others, where apiary numbers are high as a proportion of the  
total, the effect may be to cripple the ability of wild/feral bees to forage - 
 and thus thrive.  
 
Again, this may not be thought to matter.  It is however highly likely  
that wild bees play a crucial role for many apiaries in the fact that they are  
the only bees selecting systematically for health - which locates the most  
parasite tolerant and disease resistant strains.  Without their input  
apiary bees will tend to become ever--more vulnerable to predators, and  
ever-more reliant on beekeeper actions - the viscious circle of deteriorating  
health and increasing medication.
 
For these reasons I question the unqualified statement that pollen may not  
be the best food for bees.
 
Mike 
 
 

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