> But back to Artemisia, its appearance in nectar or honey may indicate bees foraging on Artemisia of course, but more likely it just blows everywhere and ends up there. 

I maintain a bloom calendar and I have specimen plants in different locations that I observe for bloom times. One is mugwort, and I have observed bees working the bloom in the early morning and then seen them switch to goldenrod as the sun strengthens.  I know they collect the pollen because I have photographed them with full pollen baskets ( see the attachment). That's not to say that mugwort has nectar, and that highlights the difficulty with mellisopalynology. One needs to know a lot more about a plant species before determining anything about a honey sample where a certain pollen grain shows up. 


PCR is the gold standard for any kind of detection but it will lead you astray unless you know the threshold cycles before detection. Maybe someone on the list can explain how this might work for pollen detection. 


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT






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