Hi James and All
> This is why simply buying any of the modern pollen supplements is a far
> better investment than trying to make this at  home.  As an alternative
> trapping fresh pollen in fall, freezing it over winter, and using it in
> early spring patties is much easier at the scale of the hobbyist, and one
> feels far more righteous feeding one's own pollen to one's bees, at least
> until you discover the prices the health food stores will pay for
> fresh-frozen local pollen.  Then, you are trapping and selling the real
> pollen, and using some of the money from sales to buy the pollen
> supplements. 

Many years ago I had a 375gm bottle of my own pollen which was left over from the previous year’s retail sales.  The following spring I was feeding my bees using hive top feeders which had centre entrances (from the colony) and floats on the syrup.  I decided to use the pollen and sprinkled a little on the floats of each of my 10+ hives.  Later that spring I burned many of my hives due to the only breakout of AFB that I have experienced in my 40+ years of beekeeping. I stopped collecting pollen and have used commercial pollen sub patties in spring since.  The pollen used in the patties is irradiated.
I figured that I was taking pollen collected from my strongest colonies and feeding it to small spring clusters so that the relatively small quantity of AFB spores in the autumn was fed to the relatively small expanding clusters in spring.  Any thoughts?

Bob Darrell
Caledon Ontario
Canada
44N80W
PS: I was connected to the internet via dial-up(our only choice here) and was using an old power Mac that I replaced in 2018 with a MacBook Air which seems unable to connect to dial-up(its not smart enough I guess).  As a result, this message won’t hit your e-mail until I visit our local coffee shop in a day or so.

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