I'm not at home with all my papers and books at the moment, but my recollection is that there is a feedback mechanism for pollen gathering (foragers are fed a small amount of brood food which, when combined with cues on the protein needs of the colony (ie. amount of open brood).

We know that putting on a pollen trap encourages the colony to forage for more pollen, most likely through this feedback loop.

We also know about the need for pollen to ferment (even a few hours) in order to create nutrients required by the bees...and my recollection is that fermented pollen (beebread) can have twice the water soluble protein as raw pollen (although I expect it is trapped pollen being referred to as "unfermented", though we know it starts to ferment before it even makes it back to the hive).

This is not the first time that I (and others) have brought up the increasing use of fungicides in agriculture...or the very strong fungicidal action of thymol (and organic acids) more and more commonly used in beehives.

The observation that bees are bringing in more pollen could easily be explained by the increased presence of fungicides in the hive...the feedback loop keeps asking for more pollen to be collected because the colony is not seeing enough available protein (and/or other nutrients).

In fact, I was at the Tucson Bee Lab today, and outside the library, there as a giant poster looking at the effect of fungicides.  Colonies that had stored pollen from orchards that had been sprayed with fungicides tended to tear down emergency queen cells at the pupal stage.  When the queen was removed, only 30% of the colonies with fungicide in the pollen were able to successfully requeen, while the control (with pollen from orchards without fungicides) were 75% successful.  They also found that the pH of pollen collected from orchards where fungicides were applied was "significantly higher" than controls (again, this is trapped pollen, which is partially fermented).  This is just from a few notes I took, and there were some graphs I didn't understand.

I also found this:
http://www.alfredstate.edu/files/downloads/New-York-Beekeepers-GDH.pdf
...most slides are not self explanatory, but slide 6 is easy to understand.

just one possible scenario.  what i don't understand is why those concerned about fungicides (clearly randy, ramona, and i are not the only ones) do not talk about thymol and organic acids.

deknow

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