Went on a mission today to identify the mystery white pollen that my bees were foraging and bringing back to the hives yesterday.  I was on the look out for Hazel but could not find any.  There are a few large mature Yew trees near to the apiary, which are in full bloom and casting great clouds of white pollen in the light breeze.

Shaking a branch of the tree released even thicker dusty white clouds.  I took a small sample of the strange little salt cellar like flowers, which I took home and made up a microscope slide, using the method I learned on the NDB Microscopy Short course.

The Yew pollen varied in size between 25um and 30um.  It is round and has a granular surface.  On most of them apertures are not evident but on one or two there appears to be a small number of pore type apertures.  The intine looks quite thick.

Looking at Rex Sawyer’s Pollen Identification for Beekeepers, everything looks consistent, except he has Yew listed as 5=yellow, rather than 1=white.  If I accept that yellow ranges from a cream colour to almost orange then I’m going to work on the basis this is Yew pollen.

What else did I see the bees foraging on today ?

The snowdrops are still being worked but are coming to an end.  There were a few isolated Christmas Roses (Helleborus) being worked and some small pockets of Crocus.  The Crocus were receiving a lot of attention and would account for some of the orange pollen yesterday.

As I don’t have a Crocus slide in my set, I took a flower home and made up a slide for this too.  The Crocus pollen is large, 160um.  Its round and does not have any distinct apertures, although its surface is pitted.

Summary

I think the mystery creamy white/grey/yellow pollen I saw going in yesterday is from nearby Yew trees.  I’ve been surprised at the range of forage the bees are bringing back to the hive this early in the season and look forward to seeing what they work on as the season progresses.

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Great to see all colonies survived the “beast from the east” and were out foraging again on the snowdrops.  It was 8 Degree C, with sunny spells in the apiary today, here in rural Northumberland.  The winter bees are collecting pollen again after breaking their tight cluster of last week.

Snowdrop Pollen Collection

The weather was perfect for some nice photographs of the foraging bees collecting pollen.  The snowdrops, despite being covered in deep snow last week, have also survived.  The snowdrops come out in carpets nearby and it did not take long for workers to visit the flowers.  It was interesting to see the heads of the snowdrops hang down and the foraging bees fly under the flower and flip themselves up to collect the pollen and press it into their pollen baskets on their rear legs.

Bees could be seen with bright orange beads of pollen on their rear legs, back at the hive entrances.  Many of the beads of pollen were much larger than they were collecting before the cold spell.

Making up a snowdrop pollen microscope slide

The last stage was to take one of the flower heads home to make up a pollen slide.  I used the approach I learnt on the NDB Microscopy short Course.  This involved cutting a small piece of fuchsin stained glycerin gel, picking it up on a needle tool and dabbing it onto the anthers of the flower.  The piece of gel was put on a microscope slide and a cover slip was placed on top of it.  The slide was then put on a warming plate until the gel melted.  Some clear nail varnish was then run around the end of the cover slip.

Under my compound microscope, I could see the pollen grains were all around 28 micros from end to end of the oval/boat shape grain.  Each of them showed a furrow type pore on the top surface, which was smooth.  The photograph above was taken on my small camera that fits into the eye piece of my microscope.  The fatty oily substance that shows on the photo as yellow is familiar from looking a dandelion pollen.  I also did a quick check in Rex Sawyer’s Pollen Identification guide to check against his reference information, which is always reassuring and a great place to find out the botanical names, which for snowdrops is Galanthus nivalis.

Ready for the Spring build up

The next steps will be to keep on standby with emergency feeding, as the colony starts to grow and consume stores.  I will also be looking to stimulate them with weak sugar syrup during the month, to try and get them ready for the autumn sown oil seed rape nearby.

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First Pollen of the season going in.  9 Degree C with sunny intervals.  Looks like they are foraging pollen from the snowdrops, that there are carpets of nearby.  Not much activity outside the hives.  A few hardy foragers are out but a look through the perspex crown board shows that the cluster is dispersing.  The workers also look very busy inside the hive.

With the breakdown of the cluster and pollen going there is a strong indication that the queen is starting lay again.  The brood nest temperature will be increasing from the winter level of 20 Degree C up to the brood rearing temperature of 35 Degree C.  This will require a lot of stores to be consumed.  So I’ll be keeping a check on stores and looking out for cold spells.

Looking through the perspex crown board, I can see that the cluster has started to spread out across the full width of the first five frames.  Capped stores can be seen on the next three frames.  A small amount of wax has been drawn between the top of the frames and the under side of the perspex crown board, which will be tidied up when I start my spring clean inspections, as the season starts and the weather warms up.

This is a good start to the season, as I’m trying to get them ready for the autumn sown oil seed rape.  In previous years the autumn sown oil seed rape has flowered in March to April.  Here in rural Northumberland, this has been a little early for the bees.

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