<Torula yeast, which is often used as a pollen supplement for feeding adult
honey bees (Peng et al., 1984), falls in the filtration size range of the
proventricular hairs. It can be efficiently collected by the proventricular
hairs during feeding, and therefore will not contaminate the honey.>
Interesting, this would seem to imply that it is digested since it is sent
to the midgut no?
Does that mean then that bees involved in honey gathering would likely be
eating a significant amount of pollen also?
It does also mention filtering out contaminates and disease agents, I would
infer that was probably the primary function then as I don't know of any
detrimental effects of having pollen in honey, but then again the amount of
things I don't know about bees could fill a set of encyclopedias.
Jeremy
West Michigan
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