Randy > My own limited personal dissection of 5th-instar larvae confirms the lack
of pollen in their guts (I beg the rest of you with 400x 'scopes to
confirm).

I just finished a small sample. I started by examining corbicula pollen for a control and to familiarize myself with images of intact exine, then midgut pollen from nurse bees and finished with 5th-instar larvae. I only selected nurse bees with their heads in cells feeding larva and I harvested whole larvae using inoculating loops so they came out undamaged with minimum contamination. 

I was able to see the midgut contents in the larva but could not dissect it out so I just lightly crushed them - it seemed to work OK.  If you look at these links you can see the results.  The midgut pollen of the nurse bees shows digestion of the grains because some look empty and deformed.  The larvae had very few grains but as the typical photo shows they are perfectly intact and every sample was similar with no indication that any of the pollen in larva was digested. I did six larvae in total.  



Corbicula pollen   https://pix.sfly.com/MRhcsi
Midgut pollen      https://pix.sfly.com/5FuAH7
Larva pollen        https://pix.sfly.com/Qngd5x  



Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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