>>> ...commercial beekeepers thought of this without help from researchers.
>> Shimanuki, et al  1983. Effect of feeding pollen substitutes to colonies 
>> of honey bees
> Therefore they could have taken the cue from the researchers after all.

We will never know, and if we could, what does it matter?

Bee researchers and commercial beekeepers talk all the time and often work 
side-by-side in the field.

The bee researchers I know are practical people and quite eager to work on 
projects which will be useful and acknowledged, not of marginal or 
theoretical interest and buried somewhere in a dusty library.

They get ideas of current issues are from discussions with beekeepers at 
meetings, by phone and email, and by working with beekeepers.  Sometimes the 
researchers come up with the questions, sometimes the beekeepers.

We call on researchers for answers to questions and they try to refine those 
questions and find answers.  Sometimes the result is a study, sometimes a 
survey, sometimes a method, and sometimes it is a new product or strain of 
bees.

Beekeepers typically try to find answers with cut-and-fit methods and 
researchers typically try to find more rigorous and universal proofs.

No matter, from each group, the answers reached are often useful, but just 
as often they are questionable and/or subject to further dissection and 
refinement.

(We see that here on BEE-L.  Peter brings us excerpts from studies which are 
relevant and interesting.  Most are pretty solid, but once in a while, he 
throws in a flakey one as joke, I suspect, to see if we are awake).

Anyhow, both parties are equally and mutually essential to making progress. 
Trying to assign credit to either one group over the other is an exercise in 
futility and a little disingenuous -- IMO. 

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