> >I was thinking of using a well known pollen supplement  as a cell rearing
> stimulant seeing as it had  "all the 10 major type proteins necessary for
> complete bee nutrition"


Hi John, just for clarification, proteins are made from amino acids, and
certain amino acids are called "essential amino acids" for a particular
species, since they cannot create proteins without them.  Dr. DeGroot
identified 10 essential amino acids for bees.

On one major suppliers website, they are listed, but not as DeGroot listed
them.  He listed their necessary percentages relative to tryptophan, which
he set at a value of 1.

I suggested to a major bee nutritionist some time ago that queen cell
starters would be a fasttrack way of testing pollen substitutes.  The common
wisdom is that you need natural pollen.  However, I recently spoke with a
queen producer who got great results with a home brew formula.  I plan to
test this myself in a month.

Please note that it may only take a small amount of natural pollen, gathered
by the foragers, to allow bees to use a supplement efficiently.  Indeed, in
the Bakersfield trial, MegaBee outperformed natural pollen alone .  In that
trial, there would have been a scant amount of natural pollen available, but
it was apparently enough to supplement the MegaBee.

Unfortunately, the report of this trial was Bowdlerized, since a major
manufacturer didn't want to have their name mentioned (JAR 47(4):265).  So
the tested formulas are not named, nor the ingredients mentioned.  I'm
surprised that it even got published!

Randy Oliver

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