>Plenty of work has been done to show that bees can't tell the nutritional
content of protein food

Pete, you may be overgeneralizing.  Foragers do not consume pollen, so may
gather organic dusts that have little nutritional benefit.  But they very
clearly prefer some dusts, feedstuffs, or pollens over others (personal
observations).

And one should not extrapolate the results of experiments with forager
preferences to those bees that actually do consume the pollen--the nurses.

Nurse bees have a clear preference for freshly-gathered pollen over
beebread (recent finding of the Anderson lab), and may well be able to tell
the nutritional content.  They also have clear preferences for some pollen
sub formulations over others (personal observations).

I don't recall studies on nurse bee preferences (other than of pollen sub
formulations or components) offhand.  Can you think of any?

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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