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Author Topic: Re-use Pollen question.  (Read 1359 times)

Offline Dr. B in Wisconsin

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Re-use Pollen question.
« on: June 03, 2012, 10:26:47 am »
Hello everyone
I have a couple of questions on pollen. I have a couple of honey super boxes from last year that the bees stored pollen in instead of honey. The comb is built out with a total area of pollen from 25 to maybe 50 % on a few of these frames. I scraped the pollen off of the frames along with the comb surrounding the pollen and put it in a jar. My questions are.
1.) Can I put the pollen / comb in the hive for them to consume?
2.) Do you just replace the honey super frame if it has lots of pollen on it?
3.) If I put the frame with the scraped off pollen back in will the bees remove the remaining pollen and rebuild the comb for honey? or just replace the pollen where it was started?
4.) What is the shelf life of pollen like this? It is not moldy.
5.) What do you do when this happens???
6.) Thanks

Offline Finski

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Re: Re-use Pollen question.
« Reply #1 on: June 03, 2012, 01:57:31 pm »
.
You use excluder when bees stored pollen over excluder?

1) Put the queen lay into that super and bees eate pollen.

2) If frame size is the as with brood frames, put some pollen frames between brood frames.

3) Storing pollen over Summer is not good idea. Betlöes and other bugs propably destroy the store.

 Let the queen lay into the frames. When brood are capped, move the frame above excluder... but if they fill it again.

So, they fill it with fresh pollen and that is valuable food for next early Spring build up.
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Offline AllenF

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Re: Re-use Pollen question.
« Reply #2 on: June 03, 2012, 02:01:16 pm »
I leave the pollen in the cells for the bees to eat.   They will get it next year.  But storage of the pollen is a must.   Mold and beetles are against you.  You can freeze pollen.   Let is dry out good after you take it out of the freezer.