What Is Pollen
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| Flower from our garden. |
Pollen is the male seed of flowers. It is required for
the fertilization of the plant. The tiny particles consist of
50/1,000-millimeter corpuscles, formed at the free end of the stamen
in the heart of the blossom. Every variety of flower in the universe
puts forth a dusting of pollen. Many orchard fruits and agricultural
food crops do, too.
Bee pollen is the food of the young bee and it is
approximately 40% protein. It is considered one of nature's most
completely nourishing foods. It contains nearly all nutrients
required by humans. About half of its protein is in the form of free
amino acids that are ready to be used directly by the body. Such
highly assimilable protein can contribute significantly to one's
protein needs.
Gathering pollen is not as easy as it sounds. Once a
honeybee arrives at a
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| Flower from our garden. |
flower, she settles herself in and nimbly
scrapes off the powdery loose pollen from the stamen with her jaws
and front legs, moistening it with a dab of the honey she brought
with her from the hive. The enlarged and broadened tarsal segments of
her legs have a thick trimming of bristles, called pollen combs. The
bee uses these combs to brush the gold powder from her coat and legs
in mid-flight. With a skillful pressing movement of her auricle,
which is used as a hammer, she pushes the gathered gold into her
baskets. Her pollen baskets, surrounded by a fringe of long hairs,
are simply concave areas located on the outside of her tibias. When
the bee's baskets are fully loaded, the microscopic golden dust has
been tamped down into a single golden grain, or granule.
One of the most interesting facts about bee pollen is
that it cannot be synthesized in a laboratory. When researchers take
away a bee's pollen-filled comb and feed her man made pollen, the bee
dies even though all the known nutrients are present in the
lab-produced synthesized food. Many thousands of chemical analyses of
bee pollen have been made with the very latest diagnostic equipment,
but there are still some elements present in bee pollen that science
cannot identify. The bees add some mysterious "extra" of
their own. These unidentifiable elements may very well be the reason
bee pollen works so spectacularly against so many diverse conditions
of ill health.
Honeybees do double duty. They are programmed to gather
pollen and carry it back to the hive as food for the colony. However,
even more important as far as humans are concerned, they are also
responsible for the pollination of more than 80 percent of green
growing things. As bees buzz from blossom to blossom, microscopic
pollen particles coat their stubby little bodies so densely that they
sometimes look like little yellow fuzz balls. When they arrive at the
next flower, a portion of the live golden dust is transferred to that
blossom and pollination is accomplished.
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| Flower from our garden. |
It is important to recognize that a one teaspoon dose of
pollen takes one bee working eight hours a day for one month to
gather. Each bee pollen pellet contains over two million flower
pollen grains and one teaspoonful contains over 2.5 billion grains of
flower pollen.
