-- randy oliver <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Home-fermented bee bread is made from in-flight bee-inoculated pollen,
stored in a plastic bucket, and fermented at about 95F.

hi randy,

please correct me if i'm wrong.  my reading of the various "bee bread" recipes i've seen, is that they inoculate the pollen/honey mixture with a specific LAB...much like if one were to brew beer or make wine one would generally add a specific yeast.  the purpose of doing this is to crowd out any other microbes present.  "cloudy" mead, beer, wine, that is fermented by a combination of several naturally occurring microbes is considered inferior.

the bees do in fact inoculate the pollen as they collect it with many molds, yeasts, bacteria, fungi, etc...and not with a relatively large amount of a specific LAB to crowd out these other microbes as we would use to make artificial bee bread.

"Fungi (molds and yeasts) and Bacillus spp. were the predominant microbes in pollen and bee bread.  Of the total microbial isolates (n=391) from pollen and be bread, 55% of the pollen and 85% of the bee bread isolates were fungi (Gilliam, unpublished).  It appeared that honey bees engaged in 'microbial farming' by inoculating pollen with specific microorganisms as they collected and packed it for transport to the colony.  Examples of the microbes that were introduced by the bees are the yeast T. magnoliae, bacteria belonging to the genus Bacillus, and the molds Aureobasidium pullulans, P.corylophilum, P. crustosum, and Rhizopus nigricans.  Most of the organisms isolated from corbicular pollen and the bee bread were also associated with honey bee colonies particularly in the guts of adult worker honey bees."

from, "identification and roles of non-pathogenic microflora associated with honey bees" by martha gilliam
in FEMS microbiology letters 155 (1997) 1-10

...much of this is as you pointed out...but unless artificial beebread is made without specifically inoculating it (as the recipes i've seen indicate), it is going to be quite different from bee produced beebread.  in addition, i expect that the fermentation in the cells with constant regulation of air flow and moisture by the bees will produce a different product than that in a bucket (less surface area per pound in a bucket, i would expect).

the recipe that aaron cited uses an airtight bucket for fermentation(which is different than fermentation in an open cell, or one covered with honey), and the text preceding it states:

"Further addition of sugars and enzymes creates bee bread through lactic acid fermentation."

...when clearly, the research of martha gilliam shows that it is more complex than just LAB fermentation....as 85% of the isolates found in bee bread were molds.

deknow

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