Review of: Prioritizing pollinators over pests: wild bees more important than beetle damage for watermelon yield

Here, the authors present a study that examines the interaction between pollination and pest pressure in seedless watermelon. The study finds that positive contributions by pollinators outweigh the losses from spotted cucumber beetle pests, and that wild bee (non-honey bee) visitors contribute more to pollination than honey bees, with large-bodied bees contributing most importantly in this study system. The study is well-executed and well-written. It is important to consider both pests and pollinators when studying agriculture, as it is here. The results of this study are important for understanding seedless watermelon production and this paper should be published without haste.

Lines 79-80: Include Nacko et al. 2022 citation here:
Nacko S, Hall M, Spooner-Hart R, et al (2022) Cucurbit crops in temperate Australia are visited more by native solitary bees than by stingless bees. Journal of Apicultural Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2022.2110742

Line 129-130: You state “Wild bees were deemed as any non-honeybee Hymenoptera.” Does this mean that sometimes “wild bees” were actually wasps or ants? It might be clearer to instead say something like: “Any bee visitor that was not a honey bee, was deemed a wild bee.”

Line 199: You mention here that you assess carpel separation (hollow heart), but without any detail on how you did it. I see in the supplemental materials (Fig S3a), there are examples of both marketable (HH severity scores of 1 and 2) and unmarketable fruits (HH severity score of 3). It would be helpful to note that this is a severity scale ranging from 0-5 (Table 1 refers to 0-5), a description of what a score of 0 and 5 correspond to, and how the threshold of unmarketability fits into this (i.e., above a score of 3 OR a space of 2.5 inches or more). Similarly, you provide images in your supplementary material (Fig. S3b) that include damage score ratings, but no mention of what this damage score means in the text. I also did not find mention of a damage score in your text, only reference to an unmarketable threshold, so maybe you want to remove the text “damage score” from your Fig S3b and instead just indicate which fruits were unmarketable due to % of feeding damage.

Line 220: “… large, bodied bees…” should be “…large-bodied bees”

Line 266: change Melissodes bimaculatus to Melissodes bimaculatus (Lepeletier)

Line 267: Peponapis pruinosa is now Eucera (Peponapis) pruinosa following Dorchin et al. 2018:
Dorchin A, López-Uribe MM, Praz CJ, et al (2018) Phylogeny, new generic-level classification, and historical biogeography of the Eucera complex (Hymenoptera: Apidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 119:81–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2017.10.007. Also, include who described the species here as with M. bimaculatus above.

Line 326: In this paragraph, you discuss differences between small- and large-bodied bees and their contributions to pollination, and I think it may be useful here to comment on the relationship between bee hairiness and their contributions as well (e.g., Lasioglossums and other sweat bees are not very hairy, but Melissodes and Bombus are).

Table 1: In 202, you have a p-value listed on the left side of the table: “P = 0.0556” but the ending two digits, 56, is on the row below. I am not sure if this is supposed to be here or if the 56 is referring to something else, the same applies to the p-value listed for 2021. Just double-check this is correctly presented, the table may just need some slight formatting adjustments.

Supplemental Tables 1 and 2: Table S1 shows fruit set (I think this is % fruit set based on the text) and table S2 shows yield, based on the manuscript text, I think Table S2 should be referring to fruit quality (maybe weight?). I’m a little confused by these two tables as they are lacking units and their captions are stating virtually the same thing. It would be helpful to clarify these captions and include units in your tables (or captions).

Supplemental Figure 3 is missing a caption.