At 08:54 AM 9/29/98 -0400, you wrote:
 
>he reduced to one deep, also moved the second queen elsewhere, and ended up
>with significant amounts of pollen in the Ross Round  supers (but no brood)!
 
>Is there an obvious reason why the one beekeeper has no problem with pollen
>stored in the supers and the other does not?
 
>Could it be because the Yellow Star flow is so late the bees had already
put sufficient pollen in the >brood combs, while with a June flow it is
likely the hive still needs pollen?  If
>so, could pollen deposits in the supers be reduced by manipulating the brood
>combs to be certain they contained a lot of pollen?
 
My guess is that one beekeeper had two queen hives with the top entrance
left open or some other situation that allowed the field bees in large
number to enter the comb honey supers directly from the field. Would need
more info for a better judgement.
 
But normally the pollen is placed both close to the main flight entrance of
the hive and adjacent to the brood combs. It is easy to get bees to store
pollen in honey frames by training them to both a bottom and top entrance,
the trick is to get them to store honey over the pollen. It can be done in
some honey flows that normally produce heavy amounts of pollen with the
honey such as wild buckwheat. I would suggest that those who master this
art would indeed have a very unique saleable product in the health or
natural food trade with value far exceeding what they would expect from
just pure honey. At least in California a product like this could not be
labeled as PURE HONEY but could be sold as POLLEN with Honey without some
changes to the law.
 
All things being normal the brood and pollen are in one area, serviced by a
bottom entrance, the nectar and then nectar and honey are move or put in
the upper areas. Upper entrances for ventilation are one thing but actually
having active upper entrances that bees favor over the bottom entrance is
detrimental to commercial honey production but very interesting. Supers can
have a small ventilation hole that are fixed with a short clear plastic
pipe that allow some ventilation and bees to exit but not enter with no
negative effects on the hive or honey production.
 
In hundreds of tests and trails that I did in this area, central
California, one thing was constant, honey production was reduced by moving
the main entrance to the top, but for sure pollen collection could be
increased and in some cases doubled by having more then one pollen trap per
hive unit. Interesting that in total brood rearing was not reduced over
time but was slowed down or extended by trapping pollen.
 
ttul, the OLd Drone
 
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