Scholarly shortcomings and a lack of evidence beleaguer bee sampling critique: A response to Prendergast and Hogendoorn (2021)

Abstract

<p>Prendergast and Hogendoorn (2021) comment on the <i>‘methodological shortcomings’</i> of Australian bee studies, but forgo the opportunity to provide a balanced assessment of the relative merits of different survey methods to inform future studies (for a constructive example of this see Packer & Darla‐West 2021). Instead, they single out standardised survey tools for bees (pan traps and vane traps) as the focus of their criticism and strongly advocate sweep netting and direct observation by skilled entomologists as the ‘pre‐eminen[t]’ methods for bee surveys. They consistently criticise the published work of a small number of Australian authors (particularly ourselves) and claim that any results from pan trap and vane trap samples lead to <i>‘incorrect conclusions’</i> about bee biodiversity.</p>