California Honey Bee Sampling 2010 Gigapan #21 by Dennis vanEngelsdorp

"Lord let the mountains be my home"...lyrics from a Phil Lesh song that ran through my head as we worked the last apiary of the trip.

We sampled bee bread (essentially stored pollen) out of several of the colonies in this apiary because the beekeeper was concerned that his bees may have been exposed to pesticides at the site of his last apiary. We saw two main types of stored pollen: yellow and orangish-red.

We had seen orangish-red pollen coming in at other apiaries on this trip so we assumed that the yellow pollen was most likely to contain the pesticide if in fact there were any present. The yellow bee bread was the older stuff most likely stored while the bees were at the previous location. Both samples of yellow and orangish-red bee bread were taken and delivered to Maryann Frazier in Pennsylvania (Penn State University) that next day for pesticide analysis.

Mike Andree