If you know what to look for, you can read it in the bee pollen. On a clear afternoon, you pull the tray off a pollen trap. The pellets that sits there already hold some information. They show what bloomed this week and how the colony is faring. Is landscape supplying enough resources? The fastest hint is color.
Deep purple pellets sits alongside cream-colored ones. This indicates that two types of plants are in bloom and the bees is working them both. This mix matters more then many people realize. To learn more about the whole spectrum of colors you’re likely to encounter, and which plants has created them, check out this infographic.
How to Read Bee Pollen Colors
In early spring, pale yellow and cream typically come from clover and fruit trees. Later in the year, golden yellow arrives from canola and sunflowers. Brick red and orange appear because of red clover and poppies, but so do near-black and violet-colored pellets, signaling borage, lavender, or maybe some other poppy.
From then on, once you begin tuning into color changes, you don’t guess anymore what’s catching the bees’ attention. You get a sense of how the season progress across the tray.
Pellet colors differ not just in shade but also in nutrition content. Yellow pellets contains more protein, which is good for raising brood in springtime. Orange pellets are loaded with carotenoids to feed growing larvae. Purple pellets is high in anthocyanins, which are antioxidants needed in times of stress such as summer. Green and dark pellets is high in minerals, which is important to overall colony health and for making wax.
No one kind of pellet alone completes a season’s haul. It’s when multiple colors appears at the same time in the trap that it’s truly worthwhile. When you catch your pollen, doing it during those color shifts yields more and better pollen.
For example, if you’re catching in early spring, the colony’s growing most rapidly. It gets light yellow to cream-colored pollen first. Catch a little, but leave some for the bees!
In summer, there are the biggest volumes and the widest range of colors. In fall, we get that amber and brown pellet kind, helping the colony store up its fat reserves for winter. That chart above explains which flowers line up with what window. Knowing that takes out some of the guessing on whether to close down the trap another day to protect the hive or leave it open to catch more.
The longevity of such colors depends based off storage options. For fresh pollen: To retain enzymatic activity and color most effective, dry it at low temperature, then store airtight in the dark; refrigerate temporarily (not ideal); freeze (good option for bulk-harvested pollen) to keep viable for several years. The key is keeping moisture low enough that the pellets do not clump or darken. Color loss signal lowered nutritional content.
The easiest clue of all: If you’re seeing only one color in your traps week after week, it’s likely that the bees have limited options nearby. Introducing some other types of plants, which flower at varying times and offer new hues to play with, alters things fast. Late-season clover, asters and phacelia prolong the party, and create a more interesting harvest, and a tougher-to-beat colony.
Watching what happens with the pollen colors also makes an ordinary chore more like reading the terrain. It teaches you about the forage: who matters; when they matter; how the colony is reacting. After a season or two the tray doesn’t feel like just a collection tray anymore, it’s become a running record of what’s available in the forage surrounding your hives. You should of checked it sooner. It’s naturaly hard to see the changes at first with such moddern tools, but you will recieve more information soon. Making sure that all furnitures is kept dry is also important.