Economic Benefits of Using Essential Oils in Food Stimulation Administrated to Bee Colonies
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript tries to improve honey production by feeding honey bees with various essential oils in sugar syrup.
Unfortunately, this work needs to be revised. It needs to add sufficient evidence about the effect of essential oils on honey bee workers or queens and the mode of action. Moreover, the author has yet to conduct a preliminary study of the effect of essential oils on honey bees in cages and skipped to field experiments with no repeated results.
For examples,
- Were the authors sure that the essential oils were dissolved entirely in sugar water and not evaporated during the honey bees' feed?
- How did the authors prepare the honey bee colonies before starting the experiment?
- How many frames per colony?
- How old are the queen bees?
- How many worker bees per colony?
- What is the purpose of the microbiological analysis? The total gut bacteria may not reflect the benefit of essential oils as the beneficial microbe also lives in the honey bee gut. This method needs to be more scientific.
- How far from the honey bee colonies from rape seed fields?
- Did the authors observe the effect of essential oils on worker bees, such as behaviour, weight, and the sugar syrup consumption rate?
- Figure 1, the graph is not labelled properly.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to address all our thanks and gratitude for the constructive observations, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Authors.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The detailed comments are in the attached Pdf manuscript file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to address all our thanks and gratitude for the constructive observations, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The hypothesis of the work is interesting, however, my biggest concern is the fact that the authors added (and recommend this in the conclusion as a good practice) essential oils to the hive only 6 days before the start of nectar intake into the hive (they wrote that experiment ended on April 14, and that rapeseed crop flowering began on April 20). We have to be careful with adding even pure sugar syrup in this period, not to mention any chemical substances, even essential oils.
Bearing this in mind, I believe that this should be emphasized throughout the manuscript, and especially in the conclusions and discussion section. I also think that it is necessary to add in the introduction and in the discussion references that talk about negative effects of essential oils on bee health, (there are a lot of papers e.g. thymol) and emphasize that one should be careful with their uncontrolled use.
Adequate referencing throughout the methodology is lacking.
In addition, the work has a lot of small technical errors and it seems that it was not reviewed in detail by the author
I am not a native speaker, but it seems to me that English should be improved.
Line 91: Apis mellifera in italic
Line 95: Why you used this concentration, please add reference.
Lines 101-101: Please add more detail about Amitraz treatment, which method for its administration was used, how many times it was repeated having in mind that you wrote “the treatment being repeated every 7 days.”
Line 110: please cite correctly: described by SURNAME [31].
Line 111: please use term “bee colony”
Line 112: Dilutions of 10-1, 10-2, 10-3 I assume -1, -2, -3 should be written in superscript.
Line 113: please use term “bee colony”
Line 115: -1 should be written in superscript.
Line 128: number 100 is written in bold style and there is one full stop
Please add the reference in which this methodology was established as a valid for Assessment of bee colony development.
Lines 131-133: S-a calculat apoi media producție de 131 miere realizat de fiecare variantă experimentală. THIS IS NOT ENGLISH
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to address all our thanks and gratitude for the constructive observations, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript tries to improve honey production by feeding honey bees with various essential oils in sugar syrup.
Unfortunately, this work needs to be revised. It needs to add sufficient evidence about the effect of essential oils on honey bee workers or queens and the microbiological analysis.
2.2. Microbiological analysis
As I mentioned, The total gut bacteria may not reflect the benefit of essential oils as the beneficial microbe also lives in the honey bee gut. This method is unacceptable and needs to be more scientific.
The microbiological analysis aimed to analyze the influence of essential oils on the total number of "pathogenic germs" in the gut of worker bees. However, the authors used only the pour plate technique on Nutrient Agar media. This technique is commonly used for counting obligate and anaerobic bacteria and gram staining but did not characterize or identify the pathogenic germs as the authors promised. Besides, reference no.41 focused on probiotics and Nosema, which is unrelated to this section.
The authors mention that the experiment was delayed by 3 weeks due to weather conditions that prevented the activities from being carried out to thoroughly check the state of the bee colonies and prepare them for the study. How did the authors know the honey bee colonies were in the same conditions before starting the experiment?
Author Response
Once again, dear respected reviewer, we would like to thank you for your comments, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Sincerely,
The authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The Reviewers have significantly improved the manuscript.
Author Response
Once again, dear respected reviewer, we would like to thank you for your comments, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Sincerely,
The authors.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors addressed to all the questions and comments. They made an effort and improve manuscript a lot. I still think the treatment period should be earlier before nectar intake, but authors added sentence about this in discussion. The treatment with Amitraz was also only few days before nectar intake, this could also make a problem with contamination of honey. Consider adding a sentence about this as well, or a reference if this practice is common in your country.
Author Response
Once again, dear respected reviewer, we would like to thank you for your comments, corrections and recommendations which contributed to the significant improvement of the paper.
Sincerely,
The authors.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
