Pollen Types Reveal Floral Diversity in Natural Honeys from Campeche, Mexico

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, study of the local flora as bee forage for nectar, pollen and resin is of great significance, which is rightfully highlighted, several times, in your manuscript. However, there is a far distance between quantitative and qualitative analysis of pollen in honey and reaching strong conclusions regarding it being mono or multifloral, which I will describe further in the following remarks:

R. 23-24: Rewrite the sentence completely as it is unclear and grammatically incorrect.

R. 32-33: Honey quality is also determined by its antiseptic and other properties (see information on Manuka honey and others!).

R. 43: Change to "Bees are excellent pollinators".

R. 46: "the third largest explorer".

R. 65-70: I believe that this section contains one of the most important statements of this manuscript.

R. 84-85: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 91-93: Change "limits to" to "borders in" and all "to" to "in".

R. 118: The information on honey sampling is very lacking and may be even flawed since the authors do not provide information on the time of year the honey was sampled. It is my experience that honey qualities completely change throughout the year with the changes of floral composition and their blooming phenology. Therefore, honey collected in May, may be completely different from honey collected in June, even from the same hive. Therefore, Table 1 does not show "all the relevant information" as is stated in the manuscript.

R. 145: Change "and were" to "that was".

R. 150-165:  My major concern here is that this manuscript assumes that the relative frequency of identified pollen in the honey corresponds to the relative contribution of these species for the accumulated honey. In most times this is not the case since bees may harvest a lot of nectar from plants with few pollen grains and even from plants with no pollen grains at all. They may even harvest pollen from plants that do not produce nectar such as maze or other wind pollinated plants and this pollen may be a major part of the pollen in the analyzed honey. Therefore, determining whether honey is monofloral or not based solely on pollen in the honey is highly problematic and far from being correct.

R. 163-165: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 185: Change to "Pollen qualification".

R. 195: Change to "each column represents the quality of each sample".

R. 197: Change to "Each sample".

Figure 3 is very important as it shows how different the regions are in terms of plant diversity for the bees. However, more pollen in the honey from a specific species does not mean that this species provided more nectar for the bees.

R. 231: Change "resources floral" to "floral resources" and write " present in the analyzed honey samples".

R. 232: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 239: Change "it showed" to "shows".

R. 232-252: In my opinion, this whole section should be removed since it does not contribute much and it is very poorly written. The general description in Fig. 4 will suffice.

R. 269: Change "explained" to "explanation".

R. 271: Change "of the" to "between the".

R. 293: Change "Identified" to" to "revealed that".

R. 298: The fact that maze, a wind pollinated species" was a major part of some of the honey samples does not mean that this is a monofloral maze honey. Therefore, this information is potentially highly flawed and should be regarded as such.

R. 300: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 309: Change "country, " to "country. Its …".

R. 317: Change "pollinations" to "pollination".

R. 319: Change "with the" to "to the".

- A professional English editing is highly recommended.

R. 360- : This sentence should be the essence of this work since quantitative analyzes here are insufficient and may be incorrect.

R. 373: Change "alternatives" to "alternative".

R. 401: Change "demonstrates" to "may demonstrate".

R. 406: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 432-433: Rewrite the sentence completely!

R. 438-439: This is not monofloral honey but rather a honey predominantly produced from some species.

R. 442-443: See above-mentioned concerns regarding maze honey.

R. 449-457: This section is very important and should be more highlighted.

In conclusion, this manuscript contains valuable information that should be described with more care and with the proper reservations mentioned above. Furthermore, this manuscript should be edited linguistically if it were to be resubmitted. Good luck.     

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors

The manuscript is interesting and shows the biodiversity in the area of study. 

You have to make some modifications:

r 42 change the plurifloral with mutifloral

r 46 " Mexico is the fifth worldwide honey producer" please add a good reference. In your reference from 2019 is written other data...

r 56    "956 genera and  161 families" first is the family and after genera

r 73-74 qualitatively (MF identification) analyses - please explain what is a qualitative analysis 

r 126 "Quantitative Pollen Analysis" please chack carefully the method and complete it after the Louveaux method ( 20) not 19 

r 144 Change with " Quantitative Pollen Analysis" to be in the same mode 

r 234 "speric" correct with spheric

Your reference can be improved with a lot of paper in the field. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors.

I have detected great improvement in the revised manuscript; however, English editing is still highly recommended as there are many remaining grammatical and linguistic errors that were not addressed.

Here are some examples:

R. 39 – Change "for calculate" to "to calculate".

R. 147 – Delete "counting of pollen grains".

R. 155-166 – The whole paragraph is written like a manual with instructions; "Prepare, Transfer, Decant… and more", instead of a description of what was done.

R. 172-173 – Change to "The identification of pollen types was based …".

R. 178-180 – Change to "The honey samples were characterized as monofloral if they contained a predominant nectariferous pollen type (pollen of polleniferous plants was excluded)".

R. 215 – Change to ".. sampled from Campeche".

R. 233 – Change to ".. and the error bar is shown in orange".

R. 324 – Change to "finally we constructed Table 3 to present the …".

R. 449 – Change to "species".

R. 451 – Change "relation" to "association or relationship".

R. 476 – Change to "samples of honey".

R. 492-496 – Very poorly written. Rewrite!

R. 513-518 – Very poorly written. Rewrite!

R. 527-528 – Change to "highlight that the ….in the diet of the bee .."

R. 513-518 – Change to ".. in the samples"

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf