> Still I don't want to give up on the uniform, small, 
> low maintenance, cheap bumblebee as an 
> experimental animal. Pollen trapping is still on my mind.   

Getting pollen off bumblebees regardless of size/type without harming them
is easier than you might think.

Collecting pollen and simply comparing color with both the crop being
pollinated and a pollen trap on a honey bee hive was a good way to show
growers that bumblebees were not working their crop, but instead working
dandelions and other "easy weed" blooms.  Some growers need some convincing,
and some just manufacture a steady stream of excuses.  Selling starts when
the prospective customer says "no".

The good news is that bumbles are not nearly as careful with their grooming
as honeybees, so you don't have to go after their pollen balls.  There's
quite a bit of "loose pollen" on their backs, their sides, and so on.

For a simple mechanical approach, you need a "door sweep" with the softest
possible bristles, and a collection box below.  The door sweep is best
adjusted with a vernier adjustment knob on threaded rod on each side of the
metal strip that holds the bristles.  This allows you to adjust the height
with great precision to make the bees push their way through, and be shoving
the bristles aside.  You will have to watch the arriving bees and adjust to
fit, but once you do, you get a little pollen off each arriving bee, and
even some pollen off departing bees.  If you need authoritative IDs on
pollen, look to Vaughn Bryant in Anthropology - Texas A&M, who is a go-to
guy on "Palynology".  You may have to remove bristles from the brush to
create a "curtain" that can be "shoved aside" by the bees, as some door
sweeps are very stiff and dense.  You may also have to re-adjust, as after a
day or so, the bees may learn and get into the habit of "crawling",
literally dragging their bellies to avoid the brush.

If you want to get fancy, or only want the pollen from returning foragers,
this is also not so hard to do, but it will take some circuitry.

You need a dust-buster type low-power vacuum cleaner, some old-skool 7400
series logic chips and flip-flops, a solid-state relay, and 4 sets of
infrared emitter-detector pairs.  You also need to fabricate a straight and
squarish tunnel section with a 6-mesh floor, solid walls, and a 6-mesh
ceiling panel.  You may need a EE student to help with the circuitry, but
you do not need a computer, you only need a pair of simple "sequential
logic" circuits that trigger for "a before b", and no other condition.
(Yes, you can do all this with an Arduino or other hobby computer, but that
will cost you 10x the cost of a simple hardwired circuit, and suck down far
more power.)

1) The bumblebee, regardless of size, enters the entrance tube returning
from a sortie, and breaks the outermost IR beam, then breaks the slightly
less outermost beam.

2)  The breaking of those two beams in that sequence triggers the sequential
logic circuit, which triggers the relay, and turns on the vacuum, which
creates some air velocity to get some loose pollen off the bee.

3)  When the bee moves on and breaks first the less inner, and then the
innermost beams, the relay is turned off, and so is the vacuum.

4)  Any other breaking of beams simply resets the circuits to "start", so
departing bees are not vacuumed.  Bumble bee colonies have nowhere near the
entrance traffic of honey bee colonies, so it is most often the case that
only one bee at a time will be in the entrance tube.

5)  You have to make some ducting to adapt the dust buster to the top of the
tunnel, and you will have to set up and mess with a relief valve to get just
enough suction to pull pollen, but not enough to pull the bee up against the
top mesh.

6)  If you want to charge the Dustbuster and a small battery for the
circuitry, you can order something like Item# 28650 from Northern Tool, a
12-volt, 7 watt solar panel, so it puts out 7 / 12 = 0.58 amps DC which is
580 mA... should be more than enough for you.  I use cheap solar panels like
that one for all sorts of Rube Goldberg devices, as power is rarely
available to rooftop bee hives.

This is all a lot of fiddling to do, but this should be no surprise to
anyone running experiments.

I'm back from vacation and got shanghaied into working at a week-long
"Holiday Fair" at the Church, and needless to say, it is neither a holiday
for me, nor is does it seem fair!  :)

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