On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:54:19 +0800, Peter Detchon <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>I have read it several times and still have no problem understanding it. Presumably 
neither did the  peer reviewers otherwise they would not have been allowed to get away 
with statements like that. PLoS One is a peer reviewed Journal of respected standing 
after all, intended to promote community discussion.

I don't think the editors really scrutinize papers all that well. If it appears well written and 
well documented, in she goes. Here are some excerpt from the paper and some 
comments:

> Honeybees defend their nest, brood and stored food through many complicated and 
efficient defensive behaviors, but populations have decreased rapidly in many countries in 
recent years. 

This is true.

> Explanations for this decline include global warming caused by the greenhouse effect, 
indiscriminate use of pesticides, reduction or extinction of plant species and other human-
induced disturbances. 

Global warming? I don't think that has anything to do with bee die-offs in certain parts of 
the world (but no particular problem in the majority of bee populated areas).

 > The Asiatic honeybee, A. cerana Fabricius, plays an important role in maintaining the 
biodiversity of plants in China.  

Could be true, but it's a completely unsupported statement.

> A. cerana is still found in the wild, where it nests in tree holes, fallen logs, and 
crevices, but it is also one of the few bee species that can be domesticated. 

This part was LIFTED from Wikipedia; they even acknowledge this in their reference!

> It has acquired some incomparable advantages in its long history of evolution 
compared with other introduced Apis species.  Nevertheless, over the last 20 years, it has 
become a threatened species in China for many reasons, most likely because of 
competition from the introduced Western honeybee, A. mellifera.

Right, it is threatened by the switch over to the vastly more productive A. mellifera. If 
the advantages of cerana were incomparable, this would not be the case.

> As an very ancient and important native honeybee species in China, many aspects of 
the species need to be explored. Here we examine the antimicrobial peptide gene 
families of the Asiatic honeybee and compare them with those of the Western honeybee.

Here's where they tip their hand. They are going to try to make a case that cerana is 
superior to mellifera. The next several pages are incomprehensible to anyone without 
extensive background in insect genomics, but this excerpt is telling:

> It is likely that additional antimicrobial peptide and cDNA genes exist in the Western 
honeybee, which may encode for the same mature peptides as reported here. However, 
there is no doubt that more antimicrobial peptides and their cDNA genes are found in the 
Asiatic honeybee than in the Western honeybee.

If the study of these genes is not completed, how can there be "no doubt" that cerana has 
more of them? And what does that prove, anyway? Perhaps it simply shows that they 
have been challenged by more different pests. 

That could make them better able to handle new pests, but such a conclusion is far from 
certain. This paper is all conjecture, and propaganda in favor of Apis cerana, the authors' 
field of interest.

plb

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