It should be clear to even the casual reader that the paper suffers from a
slight exaggerated/misleading title. The bees did NOT showing a foraging
preference for lands managed to one standard scheme or another, but instead,
showed a perfectly predictable foraging preference for the areas with more
consistent blooms.  So, ANY management scheme that allows weeds to live long
enough to bloom is sure to attract more foragers more consistently than
lands that are managed to eliminate weeds.  The "Nature Reserve" should have
been the dead give-away, as it would be, by definition, unmanaged land, or
land managed with a very light touch.

Below are my question to one of the authors, and her reply.  We have an
ongoing conversation with U Sussex, as they are doing quite a bit of work in
the City of London, where there seems to be more than one hive per block in
many areas, and NYC Beekeeping dot org is the only other major metro group
doing the scientific work and deploying capital equipment to gather "a
dataset" addressing how bees survive and thrive in an intensive hard-core
urban area, and what the actual conditions are in this sort of setting.

>> Would it not be more accurate to say that bees consistently 
>> preferred areas with a wider variety of weeds in bloom, 
>> rather than showed a preference for similar blooms in 
>> similar numbers managed to a "higher standard"?

> I definitely see your point. I think our title was more to reflect 
> the actual nature of the data we recovered. Because we decode 
> dances, we were able to map the landtypes (e.g., Rural Lands 
> under HLS, which is a category specified by the government) 
> that was most indicated by the dances as being visited. 
> However, our study did not involve going on foot to see what 
> exactly they were foraging on - that's for a later follow-up. 
>
> Dr. Margaret J. Couvillon
> Postdoctoral Researcher
> Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) 
> School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html