North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

Honeybees eat nectar AND pollen.  They comb the pollen off themselves after they have visited flowers and store it in baskets of hairs on their legs.  The pollen "pellets" are packed into cells in the hive and preserved with honey.  Both the adult bees and the larvae eat pollen and honey.  All larva are fed royal jelly (a secretion from the glands of the workers' heads)  for the first three days after they hatch from the egg.   Larvae that are to become queens continue to be fed only royal jelly.  Larvae that are to be workers are fed only pollen and honey after the first three days.  Thus, bees collect pollen from many sources including plants that are ordinarily wind pollinated, like corn.  So if they are collecting poisonous pollen from GM corn, it could easily be killing the bees that eat it.
If you look in health food stores, you will see "bee pollen" sold which is in the form of little pellets.  This is collected by attaching a "collector" to the front of a hive with wire mesh on it.  When the returning workers pass through the mesh it knocks the pollen off their legs and into a collector.  It would be possible to test the "poison pollen" theory easily enough by fitting these collectors to hives to keep all pollen out.  There are artificial pollen substitutes made of soy, milk powder and other ingredients that can be fed to the bees in place of pollen.  Of course if the soy is a GM type, that could be a problem, too.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003. 
For even more grape lessons, go to  http://www.grapeschool.com
For growing supplies and more;  http://www.grapegrowersolutions.com

On Mar 28, 2007, at 6:05 AM, Thomas Olenio wrote:



-----Original Message-----
> From Jim Fruth

You may well have hit on something worth investigating.  I have 
witnessed honeybees harvesting corn pollen (see Karl's email, below).

===
Hi,

I know nothing about bees.  Why would honeybees harvest corn pollen?  I
always thought that bees harvested nectar, and pollination was a side effect
of their efforts to collect nectar.  Since there is no nectar associated
with corn, and it is wind pollinated, I am confused.

Later,
Tom

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