[Pollinator] Competition by honey bees not significant

[Peter Bernhardt]

Dear Mr. Borst:

You are making claims you can not justify because you have not read all the
work of other people who have completed and published field studies on the
impact of non-native *Apis mellifera *on populations of anthophilous birds
and insects.  That is why I recommended the papers of Dr. David Paton to
you and other NAPPC members,  The following links may help introduce the
older literature.  Yes, both are reviews but if you finish them you will
see the papers Dr. Paton based on his own field research in the references.


http://www.jstor.org/stable/1311970

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1311970>http://www.jstor.org/stable/2641769

The fact that the *Oecologia *(2000)  study showed unambiguous, negative
results doesn't mean that ALL other studies around the world had the same
response.  One also wonders whether the other members of the Cohen lab, in
which you work, share your inflexible support for the same publications?
 Remember, the other pollen-nectar consuming animals of Europe (at least
through southern Europe) evolved with *A, mellifera *or went extinct*.  *The
history of the honeybee in the Western Hemisphere is less than 500 years
old from Canada to Tierra del Fuego.   . * *

Granted, the Patton studies may seem rather old-fashioned and quaint to
someone with a  degree in computer graphics/bioinformatics (according to
your website).  Nevertheless, they were produced by someone with real
training in field-based protocols and sampling techniques.  You trust the
work of Dr. Roubik and so do I.  However, Dr. Roubik might agree with me
that two consortia of scientists can perform the exact same field
experiment in two entirely different parts of the world and end up with
completely opposing results.  It's the differences in the two environments
that ultimately determines the results in each case.  This is obvious if
you read Gurevitch, Scheiner and Fox (2006) *The Ecology of Plants *and
focus on their treatments of famous, field experiments in chapters 5,
10-13.  Western Europe is not quite North America.  An island off the cost
of Panama is not the land around the Sonoran Desert museum in Arizona.

Peter Bernhardt

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:50 AM, Peter Loring Borst <peterlborst at cornell.edu
> wrote:

> Although competition between honey bees and wild bees
> is often expected, we did not find any evidence for significant
> effects at the densities of bees and flowers we
> studied. Further, no other study has unambiguously
> shown negative effects of honey bees on the reproductive
> success of wild bees, although resource overlap and
> competitive exclusion from the most profitable flower
> patches have been demonstrated.
>
> Interspecific competition by
> honey bees for food resources was not shown to be a significant
> factor determining abundance and species richness
> of wild bees.
>
>
> Resource overlap and possible competition between honey bees and wild bees
> in central Europe
> Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter · Teja Tscharntke
> Oecologia (2000) 122:288–296
> © Springer-Verlag 2000
>
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