In our breeding program we always collect flowers ~1 day before they are ready to open, cut them in half, and then place them under a 25 watt light bulb overnight to dry out. Then the flowers are transferred to small tins and put in the refrigerator. When we are ready to pollinate flowers we shake up the tins and then wipe up the fluffy pollen with small paintbrushes to transfer to the flowers of interest. This has worked well for us with Raspberry, Blackberry, Strawberry and Blueberry.
We did some tests this last year on pollen viability to see how long we can store pollen. We found that raspberry and blackberry pollen viability was close to zero after one week at room temperature (didn't sample for viability earlier than that). Pollen stored in the refrigerator retained ok viability for a couple of weeks but then dropped off pretty sharply. Pollen stored in the freezer lasted a little longer than the refrigerator. Last year's tests were on just a couple of raspberry and blackberry genotypes so we might do some further testing with more extensive sampling to draw hard conclusions but for now we've switched from storing pollen in the refrigerator to the freezer. I would not expect pollen stored at room temperature to last longer than a few days, though every crop type and and even genotype within a crop will give slightly different results.
Michael
Michael Dossett Corvallis, Oregon www.Mdossettphoto.com phainopepla@yahoo.com --- On Tue, 5/4/10, R F Hollaus <hollaus@comcast.net> wrote:
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