Lennard asks about traps for collecting pollen from bumblebees. As the manufacturer of Sundance traps, I can do some speculating... 1. The trap would have to be designed for the worker bees of the specific species. The size of the worker bees varies tremendously. If bumble bees are similar to honey bees, they must not have an alternative to walking through the stripper screens, and the stripper screens must be gauged to fit 'just right'. Honey bees can get through a six mesh wire, but not a seven mesh. However, if a six mesh wire is used for the stripper screens, too much pollen is removed and the colony goes into failure. Accordingly, we use a five mesh stripper screen, which removes about 50% of pollen removed by a six mesh screen. 2. Unlike honey bee queens, bumblebee queens forage. They are 2X or larger than a worker bee. I have no idea how a trap could be designed to let both queens and workers forage, while removing a percentage of the pollen from each. 3. The workers for some species of bumblebees (and perhaps all) start out very small, because their diet is pollen deficient because the queen is the sole forager. As those small workers start to forage, the pollen available for the next generations is increased and the resulting workers are larger. Toward the end of the summer, bumblebee nests around here will have some workers the size of the queen, and some up to 50% smaller. Any trap would have to accommodate this variety of sizes. So far I have only addressed potential difficulties with collecting incoming pollen. In addition there are potential difficulties with letting the bumblebees leave the nest to forage. Extensive tests have shown that if honey bees are forced to leave via the same route they arrived that *nectar* collection significantly decreases. (That is why the Sundance traps provide a different exit that is much easier for the honey bee to navigate.) I don't know if the same would be true for bumblebees, but if it is *and* the decrease in nectar collection adversely affected brood nest (which I think it would have to), then designing an exit strategy would be a real challenge. Finally, we can sell 1,000 or so Sundance traps a year for honey bees, so our design efforts can have a payback, despite the fact that traps have a life of 15-20 years. I'm not at all sure that one could sell even 100 bumblebee traps a year. (Sundance traps are used extensively to collect pollen to feed bumblebees!) Hope this helps, Lloyd -- Lloyd Office/Honey House 518-370-4989 Cell 518-573-8246 Lloyd Spear Beekeeper Inc. Ross Rounds Inc. Please visit our Facebook page<https://www.facebook.com/LloydSpearBeekeeper?fref=ts>! This email message and any files transmitted are for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Do not forward this email to another person without specific authorization from the sender*.* Any unauthorized review; use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html