I am working on pollen. The hand-collected pollen exhibited good potential to germinate over the stigma even after few months of storage under freezing conditions. I want to know: will the pollen collected by bees show the same capability towards the pollination process?
Very good idea, good luck.
From my experience with pollen, I think that the pollen collected by bees will have the same capacity, since bees are good pollinating insects. what will make the difference is especially the storage method.
Several crop plants are pollinated by bees, at least partially (i.e. when become facultative anemophiles). As far as I know and from my own experience, the pollen collected by bees from these plants (i.e. Solanaceae, as Lycopersicum esculentum, Tiliaceae, Rutaceae, as Citrus species, Sapindaceae (Acer negundo), etc., have the same potential for accurate pollination, but I doubt about the storage process.
Storage under -20oC may retain their biological value max. upto 1 yr. Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge...@ Abderrahim and Fernando.
The pollen collected at the hive entrance via pollen traps should be completely active. Stored pollen removed from cells will likely be highly variable dependent on duration of storage and stage of fermentation in each cell.
Under field conditions only pollen grains that are freely carried on the bee body are available for pollination, whereas the packed pollen loads' grins are not available. Sometimes the bee wet the pollen loads by nectar, which may farther decrease the grains viability. One may assume that the loads' pollen grains are not viable any more. Does anyone have more information about this?
HPARKER, A., J. TRAN, J. ISON, J. BAI, A. WEIS, AND J. THOMSON. 2015. Pollen packing affects the function of pollen on corbiculate bees but not non-corbiculate bees. Arthropod-Plant Interactions 9: 197-203.
This reference suggests that pollen loaded by corbiculate bees is less effective than pollen that has not been loaded into the pollen baskets
pollination is differ to the crops, some crops must be needed the help of insect like bees or sometime wind or other factor doing the best.On the other, bees pollination does not work and there must need hand pollination for example vanilla production.
I have no clue, if it will or no,
But I am wondering, how will you know exactly where the pollen come from? i.e. Bee forage hundreds and thousands of different flowers/plants species. How will you know exactly which pollen come from which plant species in order to use the pollen for pollination?
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