> Although native bees can adapt to honey bee competition by shifting their
floral visits, the coexistence of honey bees and native bees is tenuous and
will depend on floral resource availability.

 

...and floral abundance, and hence availability is significantly increased
by honey bee visits, which results in more blooms, more plants, and better
forage next year, metrics which can only be measured in multi-year studies.

 

In short, a rising tide lifts all boats, and the issue of pollen/nectar
scarcity is more a function of the western droughts and the extreme heat
from anthropogenic global warming than any imagined "competition".

 

Such doom-and-gloom papers are easy to write, and are a great basis for
attracting funding for more studies of native bees, but by now they have
become repetitive in their shrill tone, their lack of a grasp of the longer
view, and the lack of any real progress in filling in the blanks.

 

One cannot control that which one does not measure. The cursory nature of
the metrics for "competition" presented here are readily seen (as a

group) as a far more revealing metric for the politics of funding of
research.

 

As an aside, Gmail is back to their old tricks of overriding people's
detailed configurations, and it attached the entire e-mail "chain" to my
"reply", which I did not notice.  Now I have to go back and find my notes on
how I turned that off, as it has been years since.

(I used the web interface for Gmail, and replied using, it, as there was
WiFi on the plane, but only web services, no POP3 email.  I only noticed
because my POP3 client fetched the email "as it was sent", and put it in my
inbox, like a well-behaved POP3 client should. )

 

 

 


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