There is an ongoing debate if and to what extend honey bees (Apis mellifera) might present competition against other pollinators, particularly other species of bees. In our comment we reanalyze data from Weekers et al. (2022) on bee pollinators of apple, collected in an impressive large-scale study in Western Europe. We challenge one of their findings related to competition as we disagree with correlating [bee] species richness (# species in a sample) and honey bee dominance (the percentage of honey bees in the same sample). We show that according to this way of data transformation even computed datasets without any correlations inevitably result in a negative relationship. As honey bee dominance increases towards 100%, the species richness will approach one. Only one species will be present, that is the honey bee, because the values for wild bee and honey bee values are not independent. This explains why they report a negative relationship, though we found no correlation reanalysing their raw data. We hope this comment facilitates our understanding of this important topic and advances future research, as well as supports informed decisions for policy makers.

关于蜜蜂（Apis mellifera) 可能会与其他授粉媒介，尤其是其他蜜蜂物种竞争。在我们的评论中，我们重新分析了 Weekers 等人的数据。（2022 年）关于苹果的蜜蜂授粉者，在西欧的一项令人印象深刻的大规模研究中收集。我们质疑他们与竞争相关的一项发现，因为我们不同意将 [蜜蜂] 物种丰富度（样本中的 # 个物种）和蜜蜂优势（同一样本中蜜蜂的百分比）相关联。我们表明，根据这种数据转换方式，即使是没有任何相关性的计算数据集也不可避免地会导致负相关。随着蜜蜂的优势增加到 100%，物种丰富度将接近 1。只有一种物种存在，即蜜蜂，因为野蜂和蜜蜂的值不是独立的。这解释了为什么他们报告负相关，尽管我们在重新分析他们的原始数据时发现没有相关性。我们希望这一评论有助于我们理解这一重要主题并推动未来的研究，并支持决策者做出明智的决定。