There be pollen in them thar hills!

[doodlemaier]

I'd like to start trapping pollen. Probably won't happen this year, only because I want a full year of unfettered "bee"ing under my girls' wings before I go messin' with the dynamics of the new hive arrangement. But every so often when I check the bottom boards, amongst all the waxy scale, bee legs, and hive garbage, I find a few chunks that have been brushed off of the pollen baskets of busy little bees (pictured here as yellowy blobs at dead center, two, & eight o'clock).

I eat these when I find them, or at least taste them. Dandelion and lilacs are the most apparent and readily recognizible pollen sources here in Virginia's Northern Shenandoah Valley at the moment. I'm not yet able to recognize the floral source by color but that comes with experience. These tend to be tiny gobs of dryish, sweet powder that taste like they smell: vegative cookie dough. Tasting shed pollen blobs off a hive's bottom board is not unlike licking corn bread crumbs off a toilet seat when you get right down to it. But I've read that as little as a ½ oz. per day of bee pollen provides enough raw nutrients, vitamins and minerals to sustain a human being. Now, I only wish I understood the intricacies of how a pollen trap functions so that I could build a couple and apply them to my homespun hives.