{"id":7922,"date":"2011-05-10T09:06:58","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T08:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7922"},"modified":"2011-05-09T07:16:40","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T06:16:40","slug":"pollen-varieties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/05\/pollen-varieties\/","title":{"rendered":"Pollen Varieties"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve been watching our new bees coming and going and they certainly seem to be bringing back quite a bit of pollen. This is of course good news, but although we have a pollen chart<\/a> I don’t think that identifying the pollen is going to be easy.<\/p>\n

The pollen chart really only shows the colour of pollen from the major crop plants in the UK. We don’t have large quantities of these plants nearby and it seems as though the bees are collecting from a large range of plants, many of them in local gardens which may therefore not even be native plants. This isn’t a problem for the bees, in fact having a large and varied diet has to be a good thing, but it will make it difficult for us to see where the pollen is coming from.<\/p>\n

Here’s a few snaps of some bees returning with full pollen sacs over the course of about 5 minutes. As you can see, the pollen ranges from the bright orange (possibly dandelion) though various yellows to a greyish browny colour.<\/p>\n\n\t\t