Is this pollen?

[dr.buzz]

You can see where I recently cut some plastic queen excluders into strips to make robber screens, the best use I could find for them, by the way. Today I did a quick check on my 13 hives and noticed one of them had what looked like pollen all over the ground, and the ground looked all scratched up. I have before only noticed a few pieces of pollen that might have been scraped off by my robber screens. These are huge, though, bigger than anything I usually see being brought in, and only in front of one hive.

Any ideas?


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[Michael Bush]

I can't see the material clearly. If they are in reularlly formed pellets (slightly longer than wide, kind of oval shaped) and "flat" in their surface appearance then it is pollen. If it's more like flakes or shreds, then it's probably wax.

[dr.buzz]

What bugs me is how far away the stuff is from the hive. Then it hit me, that bare dirt where it looks all scratched must be a skunk trying to get at the inside of the hive, and it scratched the pollen away from the entrance. Because if that the robber screen caused the pollen to come loose, how else would it get so far away from it. Make sense?

It's just that I don't usually see only one hive bringing in any certain kind of pollen...everyone else is bringing in dull yellow stuff.

[Michael Bush]

The bees haul out the trash and sometimes take it further and sometimes not. Look for soggy piles of bees with the juice sucked out of them and if you find those, you have a skunk.

[dr.buzz]

Hmmm, why would pollen bee considered trash, I wonder?

And, yeah, I don't check my hives too often sometimes, and there were small piles of dead black shrivelled up bee carcasses in front of a bunch of hives. I figured some robbing had been going on, which is why I put those screens on. I don't know how long the dead bees had been there, so I couldn't tell if the juice had been sucked out, I just thought they were dried up from sitting there. Skunks suck the juice out? I figured they ate the whole bee.

[Michael Bush]

>Hmmm, why would pollen bee considered trash, I wonder?

To a bee storing pollen, pollen is a resource. To a house bee, anything, including pollen, on the bottom is trash. To a wax worker a flake of wax is building material. To a house bee a flake of wax is trash. To a foragers some dry sugar is food. to a house bee dry sugar is trash. "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."--Maslow