On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Lloyd Spear wrote:

>I have never seen a plastic performation that was not junk.

When I was with Juanse in Chile, we visited a commercial beekeeper who did
NO honey.  He pollinated avocado and collected pollen for sale to a place
where they raised bumblebees for pollination units.

His front mounted pollen traps used a plastic "scraper" sheet with 3/16
drilled holes.  The sheet was about 1/8 inch thickness. (Being Chile, the
exact dimensions were likely metric).  Some of the trap pollen "scrapers"
were homemade, but some were purchased from a bee supply in Argentina.
They did not look like junk to me.  In fact, I think they would be much
friendlier to the bee than a metal mesh screen such as I had on my OAC
pollen traps, assuming the drilling burrs were removed as Peter has
suggested.

Moreover, I used masonite as the material to which the two metal mesh
screens on my OAC traps were fixed.  After exposure to moist conditions I
found that these no longer slid very well in the slots.  The plastic sheet
in the traps I saw in Chile was thick enough to be fairly rigid and slid
easily.

The other nice thing about those traps was they were front mounted.  The
pollen was quite clean.  I found the OAC design got a lot of debris in the
pollen, and I would have to be meticulous about finding hives with no
chalkbrood.

But I believe that Juanse used something like the sundance design.

Stan

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