I have been trying to discover the colour of thyme pollen loads.

 

I thought this would be easy - just look it up in my trusty Dorothy Hodges
‘Pollen loads of the honeybee’.  But no - it is not listed!  So I tried an
Internet search - again no joy.

 

As a last resort (!) I went out into the garden today where we have both
thyme and bees in abundance.  Plenty of bees working the thyme, but very
little evidence of pollen loads - just the odd speck of a sort of grey/green
load.

 

So the questions are:

Does thyme actually produce much pollen?

If so, what colour is it?

Were the minute loads that I saw because thyme does not produce much pollen
that is attractive to bees, or is it because of the weather (currently in
the middle of a drought and heatwave here in the Midlands (no seriously
useful rain for the past month and temperatures in the upper 20s - hundreds
of bees at the water trough all day).

 

Best wishes

 

Peter 

52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

 


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