Honey bees and Pollen

Honey bees and Pollen

You may have noticed that the red maple have started to bud. Spring is here and that means the queen is laying eggs. While there is no nectar yet, the honeybees are out gathering pollen from red maple and other trees.

 

Good for the Bees!

Pollen is the protein source for honeybees. Seeing them bring pollen into the hive makes beekeepers like us ecstatic this time of year. It means there is brood - baby bees - in the hive that need to be fed and the hive has survived the winter and is growing in numbers. The bees have small pockets on their legs that scoops up pollen as they move across the buds and later the flowers. 

 

Good for You!

This is one of the reasons that local, raw, unfiltered honey is so good for seasonal allergies. The pollen is what people are allergic to who suffer from seasonal allergies. The bees bring this allergen into the hive, store it in the honeycomb, and feed it to the brood throughout the year. When we harvest honey at Bee Great, we capture a lot of pollen in the honey as a natural part of spinning the honey frames and especially when we add our honeycomb to our liquid honey. You ingest the pollen when you eat our unfiltered, never heated honey.

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