Abstract
High quality of bee pollen for commercial purpose is required. In order to attend the consumer with the best identification of the botanical and floral origin of the product, 25 bee pollen batches were investigated using two techniques of pollen grain preparation. The first started to identify pollen loads of different colors in two grams of each well mixed batch, and the second to identify pollen grains in a pool made of all the pollen loads comprised in two grams. The best result was obtained by this last technique, when a pollen grain suspension was dropped on a microscope slide and circa 500 pollen grains were counted per sample. This analysis resulted in the recognition of monofloral and bifloral pollen batches, while the use of the first technique resulted in all samples receiving a heterofloral diagnosis.
Highlights
Bee pollen production increased during the last years as a response to commercial demand
Twenty five samples of commercial batches of bee pollen loads were obtained in apiaries of several states in Brazil and analyzed (Table I)
The first technique considers sub samples according to the pollen load colors; each sample was made of well-mixed two grams and each sub sample was made of 25 units or pollen loads of each color
Summary
Bee pollen production increased during the last years as a response to commercial demand. Beekeepers use pollen traps of different types in order to obtain the pollen loads from bees when coming home to hives. This pollen is humid and has to be dried before commercialization. It may be distributed in vials receiving an identification that comprises, in addition, its botanical origin This procedure is important to avoid missing the accurate scientific definition of the botanical name, since beekeepers report a lot of common names of plants that were visited by the bees. The significance of the obtained results is not clear Another technically very complex preparation of pollen batches identification was recently used comprising several steps of pollen drying, hydrating and acetolysis (Novais et al 2009) and, missing important information besides pollen morphology. It neither demands long time to be performed nor is expensive
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