The Honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) Is an Efficient Pollinator for Paeonia lactiflora Pall in the Field
, Xihong Fang 3,* and Xilian Xu 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Mayor remarks
The presentation of the manuscript is more like a report. Also, no obvious originality can be identified from the current version of the presentation. Please investigate your work and clarify the originality.
Minor remarks
· Authors should avoid the lumping of references in the manuscript, but each should be discussed.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript "The honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) is an efficient pollinator for oil-peony (Paeonia Iactiflora Pall.) in the field" was properly performed and the research was very well developed. However, the following points should be improved.
1. Please check the common name of Paeonia lactiflora since "oil-peony" is not very used.
2. Line 15 - Please write in itallics the scientific name of Apis mellifera.
3. Line 48 - Please correct the words behaviour and efficiency.
4. Line 54 - Please correct the word "Against".
5. Line 55 - Please correct the word "candidate".
6. Line 56 - Please correct the word "efficient".
7. Lines 58-60: Please improve the English language, avoiding words repetition in this sentence regarding the goals of the work.
8. In the introduction nothing is said about the use of the rbcL gene and about the feasibility of molecular markers to identify pollen.
9. Clarify the following sentence: "Plants at every five raw were netted to prevent honeybee as CK."
10. In the M&M section, please provide details about the sequence of the rcbL gene once it should be specific to Paeonia Iactiflora, otherwise the authors were not able to confirm that Appis mellifera is pollinating this plant species. The references 25 and 26 are not recent and not very well related to the plant species under study. How do you reach the primer sequences? Please provide details about the experiment.
11. In the M&M section please maintain the presentation of the species as: A. mellifera and P. lactiflora.
12. Line 84: Feet or legs?
13. Line 97: "bee pollen (BP) and flower pollen (FP)" To clarify the methodology you must write before this line that in your experiment, you also collected pollen from flowers to compare with that of the samples collected in the bee legs.
14. Line 99: Please provide the number of sequenced samples (Bp and Fp) instead of the "different samples".
15. Please provide details in point 2.1 about the "non-honeybee-pollinated oil-peony plants" used for comparison.
16. Please provide a more complete reference to the software "SPSS v. 19."
17. Line 112: "and landed again to collect pollen again." Please avoid words repetition in the same sentence.
18. Line 113: please correct "mor" to "more".
19. Figure 4: Please explain by adding a note to the figure's caption what is 'CK'.
20. Line 163: Please correct "foraging behavior".
21. Please check some minor errors in some words in the discussion, and uniformize the presentation of the scientific names in all manuscript sections.
22. Lines 181-182: Please revise this sentence, since in this work, the A. mellifera individuals were exposed to newted peony plants. It was not a preference driven by the morphological traits of the plant.
23. Please check lines 189 to 191. Please rephrase them.
24. Lines 191/192: I suppose that the authors intend to say the contrary: to use reference/housekeeping plant genes, previously sequenced, as specific molecular markers or barcodes that are helpful to identify pollen samples". Please revise this sentence.
25. Section 2.4. Please provide the number of plants whose seeds were counted and weighed. Figure 4 refers to absolute or mean values?
26. In References, please remove lines 309-320 (copy of instructions to authors)
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper entitled “The honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) is an efficient pollinator for oil-peony (Paeonia Iactiflora Pall.) in the field” uses different methodology to try to explore the pollination services of the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) in an oil-peony field
However, the authors need to review some questions and improve the Materials and Methods.
General comments:
A) 3. Beijing Apiculture Silkworm Administrative Centre, Beijing 100120, China; [email protected] (X.F.)
This item (3) is not related to any of the authors
B) Standardize honey bees or honeybees throughout the text
C) Review typos as in "sevral times"
D) In the Materials and Methods it is not possible to understand how the planting and maintenance of the plants for the subsequent evaluation of honey-bee-pollinated and non-honeybee-pollinated oil-peony plants was carried out.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
