I should add, that the described methods are not completely the same. With acetolysis you will just see the sporopollenin, so just the outer walls of the pollen grains. With fuchsin jelly the pollen will stay "intact" with its cellular content. Under the light microscope the view will not be the same. If you already have some experience with pollen counting, I would choose the method you already know, if not it does not really matter.

pollen collected should be dehydrated by adding a drop of absolute alcohol on a slide allowing it to dry and repeating the procedure for three to four times. Then it can be mounted in basic fuchsin jelly or even safranin stained glycerin jelly .

Pushan, I wish to add that the reference pollen of my laboratory include slides of pollen from honeys that were prepared with the two methods. This means that we extracted pollen from one honey: the first part of the residue was mounted fresh and coloured with fuchsine; the second part was treated with acetolysis. Each reference slides have two cover slips: one covers pollen with fuchsine and one covers pollen with acetolysis. This is helpful to observe and compare the same pollen type in the two forms.

May be you can follow the methods on this research:

http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/89/19/47/PDF/hal-00891947.pdf

Collecting pollen from the corbicular load (pollen sacs on the bees' legs) involves soft brush and softer hands. Just brush off the pollen loads from the legs as the bees try to enter the hives, if required using simple barricades that delay their entry into the hive doors. This does not harm the bees in anyway, except that you rob them of their hard work.

Acetolysis is ideal, and in case of pollen from bees, ensure that you do it only for a short time (not more than 3-4 minutes). We have also tried depositing corbicular loads on glass slides, adding acetolysis mixture on the pollen material and gently warming it, then mounting with glycerine. This has also given us good results. Of course, with acetolysis you may lose a few of the fragile pollen taxa, but every method has its caveats.

We always prefer mounting in liquid glycerine and sealing with DPX mountant for temporary mounts.

Experience in pollen recognition in any medium is very important. A simple , fast, and in which not lose any kind of grain, is the method we use in the Laboratory of honey and other products from the hive, in the Agricultural Center Marchamalo . Simply balls punctured with a needle and pollen deposited these grains in water droplets on a cover slip on a hot plate at 40 ° C. Placed on a slide glycerinated gelatin , and when water droplets are dried and gelatin has melted , the cover slip is placed on the slide . The next day , as divided dry gelatin preparation , sealed with nail polish ( very cheap and useful means ) and can be read . The samples thus prepared can be stored indefinitely. Yes, the pollen is completely natural, without acetolysis , thus , be prepared for pollen in this state. It is neither easier nor more difficult than otherwise.

Amelia