At 09:22 AM 2/8/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Thanks for the fresh air, Andy. I still recall your talking about the
>purity (NOT) of beekeeper collected bee pollen for human consumption and
>your reasons for no longer participating in the promotion thereof.
Hi Allen, & Bee Friend,
I know you did not ask but this comes to mind and I must again say it, if
again:
Yes for many years I trapped pollen from my bee hives, I was one of the
early leaders in this field, I even have an unpublished book on the subject
that I may put on the Internet some day. I trapped pollen first for
the information on what my bees were working and my own use to feed my own
bees and later on to supply other beekeepers with pollen to feed their
bees. It is one of the most enjoyable experiences I had in keeping bees.
Early on I filled requests for bee collected pollen from research
institutes such as were doing bee research and human research, at no cost
to them and I even paid the shipping of the 30#, five gallon cans and
latter on plastic buckets. I harvested, cleaned, and froze all the pollen I
collected and only by accident when I misplaced a can did I find out how
real super bee feed could be produced by naturally fermenting the pollen
before using it, which never has been much reported by me or anyone else.
(you saw it here first on the Internet) <G> I also learned how to produce
wax worm silk, and wax worm parasites but that's another story.
Why did I stop when I saw the price increase from $1.00 per pound I was
charging to $5.00 per pound. Two things really bothered me, one was people
were using pollen as a food and I knew that unlike honey that in its
Natural, Organic or Pure condition is relatively safe for most people to
eat with about the same numbers of people having problems as those who have
problems from bee stings, but with pollen which is not and has never been a
clean food and contains every bad thing that can be found in our
environment the number of people who have problems when consuming it rises
to levels maybe 100,000 times that of honey, mostly from allergies, and I
did not want to become involved in that kind of business. This was my own
choice and today pollen as a human food or food supplement is greater then
it ever was and can be found in many forms in most any national retail drug
store besides that which is hawked by the normal outlets for so called
health foods and as far as I know NO one is being made ill or dying from
eating it, but there is some Luck in everything we do today, just ask our
President...
People who sell pollen for human consumption and those who buy it to eat
always remind me that at one time I raised big fat red worms commercially
and all they ever got to eat was smart pills from my 200 doe rabbitry.
These worms grew to sizes never seen in the wild, they were so sexy that I
could not only sell the whole worms but I could sell their eggs by the
gallon to others who wanted to start their own worm farm. I never did try
to sell anybody on the idea that smart pills from rabbits would be good
human food but it sure was good food for the worms. Not once did I ever
have anyone buy any smart pills from me to eat so they would get the same
benefits as my worms got from consuming them.
Pollen is the best natural bee food I have ever found and yet I am not
convinced it is even safe for human consumption. I can say for a fact
research was done to grow hair on over sexed bald men and it did not change
their sex drive or grow any hair. RR fed it to his horses, if he ate it
himself it sure did not keep him from getting old or old timers disease, he
always has been older then me and to be alive and much loved at 87 is
great. I tasted my pollen often myself, and even breathed it for years and
I still got cancer on the end of my noise. I once gave a 5 gallon can to a
guy who begged me for it as his wife was terminal with brain cancer and she
died. That ended it for me, I put my traps in the barn and they are still
there.
The 2nd reason I stopped also has to do with bee research (BS) and is
closer to what most of us do everyday and that is the attempt to keep
healthy bees by adding to their diets sugar and proteins including some
pollen. When I started trapping pollen chalk brood was unknown or rare in
the bees hives in the USA. Some old timers could remember seeing it back in
the early 40's, but few had ever seen it, including myself and none had a
problem with it. Later on at the time it was being found and becoming a
problem here in the US and other places I started trapping pollen, I had NO
chalk brood at the time or none I could see. I was selling pollen to the
USDA for them to feed their research bees at $1.00 per pound, each year
they took a few more cans and each year it took more red tape and longer to
receive payment for it. It got so bad I had to sign legal forms that I was
not a Red mad dog commie, that I hired all who asked for work including the
mentally ill and blind, and much more. Hard to believe I had to sign a
Loyalty Oath just to sell the USDA bee pollen they wanted to feed their
bees and then wait six months to receive payment. Even I have limits to
what I will do for my country and one year when I to this day do not know
if I was ever paid for the year before's shipment of pollen I raised my
price to $3.00 per pound to cover the added costs of doing business with
the government..
I never sold another pound of pollen to the USDA, but even though the same
laws that I must obey specifically state that the USDA will buy all farm
product and more from a US source first before going off shore for their
needs they chose to buy their pollen from a northern producer using an
importer to cover their tails. This northern producer had a bad chalk brood
problem and would grind up the mummies with the pollen and sell the
resulting product that contained a very high percentage of chalk brood
spores, I am talking 5-10% by weight. I did not know at the time but the
pollen that I was selling the USDA and what they purchased from the north
was used by more then one bee lab and of course they all broke down with
chalk brood almost at once. We got a lot of chalk brood research after that
as you could well understand and no information a beekeeper could use to
cure it other then not feed pollen with chalk brood mummies or trapped from
hives that have chalk brood. Yes we pay for that kind of common sense
information everyday when we look to our regulatory scientists to do bee
research and in enlightened places like the Left Coast of America we pay
twice because if the University of California does not do the research work
it won't work here or be permitted here until they do it. I never knowingly
trapped pollen from a hive with chalk brood, and if I found a hive with it
I would stop trapping it. I have seen others who were trapping pollen for
human consumption that were able to clean out five gallon or more buckets
of chalk brood mummies every day which does make good chicken feed or at
least they will eat it. That bee outfit does not sell pollen for bee feed
or even feed their own pollen, no wonder.
Anyway I think those who feed pollen other then that which they know was
produced from hives that did not have chalk brood are flirting with
disaster of a scale that could conceivably put them out of the bee business
as to this date there is no cure for chalk brood. The best pollen for
feeding bees is like the best queens for re-queening them and that is what
the beekeeper produced with his own hands. Some bee breeders would never
trust even their own kids with picking breeder queens, most will let their
wife's do the grafting if they are that lucky to have one who will do it,
and I would think the same care should be done when picking the yards to
trap pollen, any chalk brood in any yard should be enough to stop trapping
in that yard if possible, unless you are going to sell it to the USDA Bee
Labs. It is not even clear if the pollen from a hive with chalk brood needs
to have the mummies to pass on the chalk brood to another hive, I suspect
not but don't know the answer. Chalk brood could be like AFB spores and the
numbers required to cause an infection is very high so that an occasional
few thousand or million spores may not cause any symptoms.
There is so much that we beekeeper know not of what we speak when it comes
to the environment and bees that is basic it boggles my mind. I too look to
Jerry B. to blaze some new trails into a better understanding of what we
all assume is natural and may not be all so pristine. I do know that the
honey from the most secluded mountain tops far removed from man, machines,
and their dirt does contain detectable levels of hydro carbons and other
things that we would/should not expect to be there. But then we can now
find a speck of dust on a beach and no one would expect that speck to be a
problem unless it is the one that triggered that cancer on the end of my
noise and then I say clean up the beach.<G>
Well I am going out to pick up 10-39 cent hamburger a MacDonalds, just look
what they did for our President and he only eats them one at a time. I will
report back if the young girls are successfully in molesting me.
ttul, the OLd Drone
"Where there are fruits & nuts, there are beekeepers"
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