Bee Pollen Identification for Increased Sustainability

View the project final report

Commodities

• Animals: bees
• Animal Products: Bee Pollen

Practices

• Animal Production: animal protection and health

This project seeks to reconcile the juxtaposition of two experiences that I have had in my beekeeping career:

First:

I met a beekeeper many years ago who made his living by selling bee pollen to a pharmaceutical company who was owned by a family that I knew well.  The pollen being sold had to be 95% pure to the designated source to pass quality control.  My friend that performed quality control for the pharmaceutical company shared that this beekeeper's pollen never failed their purity standards.  This beekeeper, who has since passed away, is a folk legend in our corner of Appalachia.  As such, accounts of how he accomplished this without any formal education or training is often anecdotal rather than scientific.

Second:

Much of my work as a commercial beekeeper has been focused on nutrition.  Beekeepers have long enjoyed a range of options for supplementing carbohydrates in their colonies when resources are scarce, but the same cannot be said for protein.  Pollen supplements until relatively recently were not commercially available and widely regarded to be inferior to natural pollen.  Even with the improvements that have been made, pollen substitutes are expensive, involve a labor input to apply, exasperate hive beetle-related problems, and are still thought to be inferior to natural pollen.  Accordingly, I have long been interested in better understanding the pollens that are coming into our colonies.  This interest led me to the late Dr. Vaughn Bryant at Texas A&M University who was widely regarded as the leading pollen identification expert in the land-grant university realm.  

The objective of this project was to determine if pollen analysis was achievable in-house.  The motivation to do so would include the benefits of improving our colonies' access to nutrition as well as the possibility of creating an additional revenue stream by selling bee pollen to pharmaceutical companies.

The likelihood of achieving this objective was in sharp contrast depending on who I was consulting.  My contacts at a pharmaceutical company were optimistic and referenced the before mentioned beekeeper with no formal education as an example of success; meanwhile, Dr. Bryant argued that acheiving a standard of 95% purity was not possible without a commercial lab such as the one that he operated at Texas A&M.