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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