Randy Oliver – Honeybee Nutrition (Part 4)

Honeybee Nutrition

by Randy Oliver

Part 4

Vitamins and Minerals

Vitamins and Minerals, you probably need the B Vitamins. That’s why many Pollen Subs have yeast added to them for the B Vitamins. But, and yeast has been used for a long time, very successfully. I’ve used it for many years, certain brands I like better. And then when I ran my large scale Pollen Sub Trials, the two [2] yeast formulations just eat them. So, I don’t use yeast formulation any more. I don’t even use my home brew formulation any more. Because the some of the off the shelves one out perform my home brew so much better. Possible Vitamin C, possibly some other ones, we really don’t know.

Trace Elements and Salts

Trace Elements, one for sure I can tell you is Zinc. That was recently published, and I strongly suspected Zinc, and I had already done all the calculations for how much Trace Mineral Salt to add to get the Zinc up. Because Zinc is a component of the Vitellogenin. So, if you don’t have enough Zinc, the bees cannot make Vitellogenin. So, the Zinc, I don’t have the reference for it. It was just published on the Benefit for Supplementing Bee Diets with Zinc. So, you probably want to make sure there’s enough Zinc in there.

A lot of the Eastern Europeans are supplementing with Cobalt, having what they say is good results. Some of them supplement with Iodine, and also Selenium. If you’re deficient, that’s a critical one. So, but there’s other areas like the Imperial Valley with Selenium is so sky high that some of the pollens are actually toxic to the honey bees. And so, you have to be relative to wherever you live. So, and you can go to www.USFS.com and download the concentrations for your area very easily. See if you’re short in a nutrient, in a trace element, or not. So, you may want to make a Pollen Sub that’s different for wherever you live. Whether you have enough of these trace elements, or not. Cause if you give them too much of a trace element, then you poison them.

Remaining Questions

1. What is the Missing “Factor X”?
2. Critical Lipids and Sterols?
3. Other Phytonutrients?
4. Salts and Trace Elements?
5. Best Sugar: Protein Ratio?
6. Most Cost-Effective Ingredients.
7. Is De Groot’s Amino Acid Ratio Ideal?
8. What Location In Hive To Place?

The Main One, what is that Factor X? What factor or factors are missing that allow a Pollen Sub to raise more than one [1] generation? Bees can, the “nurse bees” can steal from their bodies, or pass on the vitellogenin from one generation to the next for two [2] generations, and the third [3rd] one they tank.

Amount To Feed

The amount to feed, minimum a hundred [100] grams of protein per week. Okay, now that, if you have fifty [50] grams coming in on natural pollen, then you only have to make up the other fifty [50]. You don’t have to have a hundred percent [100%] feeding, unless you’ve got forty-thousand [40,000] hives sitting in one [1] yard. Then you’ve got to do the whole thing.

Minimum one hundred [100] gram protein/week 1 – 1pound times ten percent [10%] protein = 45 grams A one pound pattie at ten percent [10%] protein is only forty-five [45] grams. People who think that they’re feeding their bees by putting a one [1] pound pattie every couple of weeks. You’re giving them an appetizer. One [1] pound pattie is not, especially if it’s a low protein, ten percent [10%] one. If it’s only that protein one, you’re starting to get to the right area.

We Typically Feed two and a half [2 ½] pound/week Fifteen percent [15%] Protein Patty We typically feed about two and a half [2 ½] pound patties, two and a half [2 ½] three [3] pound patties of a fifteen percent [15%} protein in our operation. That about once a week. Yeah, for a strong colony.

How To Prepare Pollen Supplement

Okay, preparing pollen sub. The easiest way is just to buy it, pre-made patties. If you use the one [1] pound patties, it’s hard to put three [3] pounds in a hive at a time. If you’re gonna do that.

Mix Your Own

You can mix your own. You can use a hand mixer; you can use a machine mixer.

Basic Formula

And it’s the formula:
Protein Source
Some Fats
And if have natural pollen you’ve collected, that’s good.

Protein Sources

These are some common ones here: Yeast used to be a very popular. We’re seeing a lot more of the Corn Gluten. I just [Inaudible] this morning, but I shall get back to that. Egg may be another one. Or whatever is local. So, when I go to different countries, where the beekeepers like, the beekeepers in Chili, they were getting paid fifteen dollars [$15.00] for Almond pollination. There’s no reason to put four dollars [$4.00] or ten dollars [$10.00] worth of pollen sub in there, if you’re only getting fifteen dollars [$15.00] a pack. So, they have to find a local source of something that was cheap. So, different countries use different things.

Soy, which was used for many a long time, there’s a problem with soy. There’s the two [2] main sugars [Raffinose Stachyose] are toxic to honey bees. It also has a Trypsin inhibitor, so what they need to do is do like. You have to get a low sugar soy flower and toast it, in order to destroy the Trypsin inhibitor. Whether it’s expeller processed or [Inaudible] extracted tells you how much fat is in there.
One way to get around it is to use the Soy Protein Isolate, which the bees absolutely loved; ninety to five out of six percent [5 to 6%] soy protein doesn’t have the sugars or the Trypsin inhibitor. It’s a little pricy, but the bees, I’ll tell you right now, they love Soy Protein Isolate.

Shift to Corn Gluten

To Corn Gluten, it’s not really Gluten. Okay, Gluten is in wheat and rye. But they call it the Corn Protein Corn Gluten. It’s relatively inexpensive, and works really well. So, this is one of the things I mentioned, I recommend it. They look out in Chili, and sure, and how they get Corn Gluten relatively cheap, and their bees are loving it down there.

Then the questions is, if you put in a coarse ground Protein Meal, the bees just kick it out of the hives. They suck and lick all of the sugar off it, and kick it out. You see it out in front of the hive.
So it has to be ground down to about the size of pollen grain, so you’re talking about thirty five [35] microns, or so. I was talking to one [1] of the manufacturers of, a major manufacturer of Bee Feeds, and he says, something like half [1/2] of his cost is in the grinding. It’s not for the raw materials; it’s just for the grinding to get it down particle size small enough.

Typically ten to twenty-five percent [10 to 25%] Crude Protein. Dumping your Crude Protein, this is what we used to use. We used this for years, Brewtech Yeast. Put in some Lipids, put in some Sugar, Natural Pollen. Okay, make sure it’s clean. When pollen is brought to The United States, a lot of it comes from China. But it’s illegal to feed it to bees, because it only has X Import License to be fed as “human feed”, because if it’s fed for bees, it has to be sterilized, because pollen is a really good Vector for any kind of Path [Inaudible] for bees. Not only for bees, but for any insect. And all these insect viruses and Nosema are not just for honey bees. They’re for all bees. Now there’s only one place in the World where you’re gonna find two [2] species of honey bees living next to each, and that’s Asia. We have Apis Millifera Apis [Inaudible], both living there along with all the other Native Pollinators. And if you collect Pollen in China, you’ve just got a cross section of every DE pathogen known to Pollinators in China, where you have two [2] species of honey bees living right there, and everything else. You ship it over here, and you double your pollen sub. This was a very popular practice in the early two thousands, [2000]. It’s just before we got CCD. I don’t know how much was what we we’re importing. There’s still a lot of beekeepers who are illegally using Chinese Pollen today in their Pollen Subs. I think it’s just like the stupidest thing you can do. So, I would suggest you not put in Chinese Pollen. You wind up hurting everybody, not just yourself. You put that in there, you get a new strain of virus that evolved in China, put it in your Pollen Sub; take your bees to Almonds. They crash, then it gets distributed to the whole rest of The United States that year. And in one year, you have caused that damage across the entire country, simply because you are saving money on buying some Chinese Pollen doubling your Pollen Sub.

Natural Pollen?

Make Sure That It’s Clean. Water or Syrup And you put water or syrup.

Sausage Mixers or Mortar Mixers work very well.

There’s Dennis Lohman [SP], one of the GI [SP] he sells, Equinox. Or, you can mix it in a wheel barrow by hand, with a mortar hoe. You mix it up well. Then we take our rubber, our plastic tubs, put a little bit of Corn Oil in there to make them non-stick. Pour your Pollen Sub in there. Put it on the truck, let it sit overnight. The next day we get out there, you sprinkle some sugar or some dry sub on a hybrid, or on a board. Dump it over, take a spade and just cut it up in chunks. Smoke the bees down so you don’t crush them. This is important in the Winter. I ran a Trial of what happens when you crush bees in the hive? Didn’t get any effect during the Summer. But in the Winter it made the colonies go downhill. Put in your Sub, and then when you put the box down and lift the box back up, it just squishes [SP] right between the frames. That’s how you get large quantities. Now with small hive beetle, that’s a problem.

Small Hive Beetle Caution!

Small hive beetle egg laying area! I don’t have small hive beetles, so I have not been able to experiment, to figure out. And I’m really surprised that somebody hasn’t figured it out. Maybe try to come up with some way of feeding Pollen Sub that makes it, have a shell routed or a wrapper or something, to make it no-attractive to the small hive beetle. So, okay. I’m counting on you to come up with something on that. Because this is a big problem with people with small hive beetle areas.

Using Fluorescent Tracer To Track Protein Sub Distribution In The Hive

So, I used fluorescent tracers. So, I bought, I went to a black light store, and I bought a bunch of different fluorescent tracers, and then put it in bees and cages to test it for toxicity to find out ones that were not poisonous to the bees. And then crushed the bees in a Ziploc bag, put them under a black light. And I don’t know if you can make out, each one of these has an orange label telling what it is. You can see that some glow much better than others. And I will tell you from experience now, out of popular researchers. Whichever color you choose, when you run your experiment, the bees will seek out the pollen that rests under the exactly same color when you try to analyze the result. It is so annoying; I have to keep changing colors of pigment, because the bees invariably come back with the pollen that also glows. Very frustrating. So, I setup a Trial with the two [2] colonies. I mixed the fluorescent tracer in with the Pollen Sub. Either fed them between the two [2] boxes, or on top of the hive with a rim.

Checked The Ground With UV “Black light” At Night

And then after they had been fed that, I went out at night. I put screen bottom boards on those hives. Picked up the hives, looked on the ground with a black light at night, to see how much of the Pollen Sub wound up on the ground, or in front of the hives. With the Sub that I used most all of it went, did not wind up on the ground. The bees ate most of it.

Field Constructed Black Light Tent

Then we took our forklift, raised the forks up, and draped it in two [2] layers of black plastic, and made a Field Blackout Tent. I put one [1] Sub inside, and the others, and we went through all these hives then, and took put every frame, one [1] at a time. Marked down whether it was a drone comb, a honey comb, a brood comb, or a beebread comb. And then Eric inside then looked at under a black light, and to see if there was any trace of fluorescents on those.

Bees Do Not Store Patty As Beebread

First [1st] they found out none get stored a beebread. Zero, there is no glow whatsoever in the beebread.
Bees have no behavior to move Pollen Sub Patty into the cells.

Initial Findings:
1. No Patty Stored In Combs
2. No Patty Fed Directly to Larvae
3. Little Patty Wasted

Second [2nd] one, none is fed directly to the larvae. None of the “jelly” glowed. Occasionally we see a little fleck in the nectar, where apparently a “nurse bees” eating it got a little bit of fleck on their mandible. And when they went into a cell to get nectar out, it fell off in there. But we didn’t find any inside the larvae cells. And a little of the patty was wasted.

Brush a Bee Sample From Every Comb

Then we brushed a Sample of fifty [50] bees from every comb labeling what it was. And then marked them down, froze them all, and now we had a hundred and five [105] samples, it was five thousand [5,000] bees to crush, to see what the distribution among the combs was of the Pollen Sub that they ate. Are you all with me so far?

The Crush-A-Bee

So, I designed the Crush-A-Bee. So, I printed off grids of fifty [50] crosses on sheets of black paper.
You take the frozen bees, and lay out fifty [50] bees. Put about, pull off the waxed, Saran Wrap off the roller. Drop the Masonite on there, and I happened to come up years ago with this brass roller, brass roller you can barely lift up. So it just sat there, and you can roll it with one [1] finger, and you crash it all across, and crush all the way back. And when you pull it off, the bees are all crushed. All the guts out of there, and you can peel back the waxed paper. And this is what you look like right here.
So, you just look at all these bees, but you can’t tell which ones ate the Pollen Sub yet. But if you put it under a black light, it’s really clear which ones at the Pollen Sub. So, then I could do this, and count what proportion of the bees on every frame have Pollen Sub in their guts.

Bees From Entrance

So, here would be a Sample of bees taken from the entrance of the hive. Okay, so, which is kind of surprising how much Pollen there was in the guts of the bees coming from the entrance. Under black light, one little bit there, and one little bit there. Not much Pollen Sub in the guts of the bees coming back to entrance.

Bees From Brood Nest

Here’s one from bees taken from the Brood Nest, and again you can’t tell by looking at under visible light. Under black light, lots of Pollen Sub on the bees from the brood nest.

So, what we expected, hypothesized is that if you, when we put the Patty right here, that we would have.
And this would be the Brood area in the hive. And you’ve have honey up around here. We expected, and I ranked every one by percent of the bees with fluorescent tracers. So, more than fifty percent [50%] have florescent tracer in their guts, it was red. It goes down to less than twelve percent [12%], zero to six [0 to 6] bees out of fifty [50], it would be this color. And I expected that the bees in the Brood Nest would have the most fluorescent tracer. And the bees in the outside the Brood Nest would have less.

Well the actual results look more this right here. And really surprising where they were. This is for the fed in the middle. This is for the ones fed on the top. It had three and a half [3 ½] inches of honey right here. Not as much Sub in there. And then a bear got into my freezer. So, I don’t have the rest of the data for you.

Which Age Bees Consume Pollen Sub?

One thing you learn if you start doing Bee Research, is be prepared to spend a whole lot of meticulous time, and then find out that something goes wrong, and it’s all just a waste of time. This has happened twice so far this Spring. And I’ve got huge amounts of data that are just wasted because the weather didn’t cooperate, or something went wrong. It can be very frustrating doing Bee Research. So then I was curious what age bees? Cause I saw this all over the hives, this Pollen Sub marked in their guts. So which age bees are actually consuming it?

Mark 60- Newly Emerged Workers

So I emerged bees in an incubator. And when they emerged, mark them with paint on the backs. So, I marked six hundred [600] bees. Put them in the hive; feed the hive, fluorescent marked Pollen Sub. And then I can squash, I took out ten [10] at a time of the colored marked bees every couple of days. And you can see what they were. What I found none were made it the first [1st] day. A hundred percent [100%] of them made it the second [2nd] day. And then it got a little iffy, so what I just got is a new scope. I got a, these are still in the freezer, I’ve got to go back and it was. They started eating a pollen that was fluorescent, about the same color. So I’ve got to get the black light hooked up to the microscope, so I can get the rest of it. So, I haven’t published this yet. When I relook at these samples, then I’ll get the results on that.

Dry Feeding

Dry Feeding, you can put out Pollen Sub dry, and the bees will avidly go right to it. They flap their wings, it gets in the air. When bees flap their wings, they build up an electro-static charge, so the Pollen Sub in the air just sticks to their bodies. They comb it off; they pack it on their hind legs.
You can see it all over the hind legs, and they fly away. They never had to touch it, they just only.
If you make an enclosed area, and I’ve designed a couple of Dry Feeders, where the bees fly into an enclosed area, and the air is just full of it. They just fly around, and they fly out there, and they comb it off, and they take the loads back to the hives.

Comparison Of Patty Feeding Versus Dry Feeding of Pollen Supplement

When I did the math, when I went out there and measured in bee yards, how much they would consume? And then figured out how much a hive, on an Average of that yard, consumed by Dry Feeding? Compared to feeding a seventy percent [70%] Protein Pollen Patty, their Consumption Rate, you can actually with the Dry Ultra Bee, which is the Corn Gluten. You can actually get more Protein into a hive by not even opening a hive, and letting them gather themselves. Plus it has the huge benefit is that they store it as beebread for long-term storage.

Clear Preferences!

There are very clear preferences for the dried products. And I set them out for Feeding Preferences like this. And you’ll have clouds of bees at one [1], and they’ll be ignoring another. And then you take the cups, and you shift them like, and them thirty seconds the bees all move to the new location. They really have clear preference on some. And it’s not; some have a strong odor that I can smell with my human nose, if you grant me that. And the other ones I can’t smell, and the bees, some of the ones like Soy Isolate, which has no smell to me. Man, the bees just love that stuff.

Tracking Dry Feed With Fluorescent Marker

So, then I wanted to see what happened, so I made sure that I could put a tracer. I mixed a Dry fluorescent tracer in here. Make sure that you can see the bees glowing when they left it. And see whether they packed it in the cells? So, this is a comb that from a hive in the yard. I fed the Dry Sub for one [1] hour in that yard. Pulled this comb out, put it under black light. Okay, they bring it right in, and they pack it in. They start making beebread out of it. If you look at it under the scope, the bright yellow is the Pollen Sub. And these are Natural Pollen Grains, and I just mix it right in with Pollen Grains, and they ferment it into beebread. So, then I asked Kirk Anderson [SP] at the Tucson [Inaudible]. And I said, Kirk, the question is, is it any good when they ferment it? Is it actually nutritional? So, he will, his student will be presenting at The California State Beekeepers with the results of that. Where they actually did cage trials then to see how well the bees did? How much Protein they got out of it? And how well they did? The heads-up I’ve gotten is that there were issues.

Dry Feeding Pros: Easy Stored As Beebread

Dry Feeding Cons: Uneven Uptake Between Hives May Not Be As Beneficial When Fermented

The other thing I found, let me see. Okay. It’s really easy, you don’t have to open a hive, the bees feed themselves. They do store it as beebread for later use. Huge differences in uptake between hives. Some hives in the yard will just brood up and look really good. Other ones won’t even touch it. So it’s inconsistent in the yard. And it may not be as beneficial once it’s fermented for the bees.

Liquid Amino Acid Supplements
Perhaps of Benefit – But Cannot Supply Enough Protein

One of the things in South America, Mexico and Spain and Portugal, there is a horse supplement called Promoter [SP]. And it was Promoter [SP], a horse supplement. It was a Soy Protein Hydro Solate, [SP] where they use it, Acid to break down Soy Protein into its Amino Acids. And they sell it as a Nutritional Supplement for horses. Beekeepers started using it, and now there’s two [2] brands. One called Appi Promotor [SP] for bees from Apis. And the other called Promotor L, used widely by beekeepers in those Latin countries. Okay. So, the guys down in Chili, man, they just, they were spending a ton of money on this stuff. So, I said, Well, tell you what, let me look at the ingredients. So, we looked at the ingredients, we said, this was like eleven o’clock [11:00] at night at the table. Pulled out the spreadsheet, we did a calculation. I said, Well, yeah, you’re getting Amino Acid, but you’re paying seven [7] times. Cause one [1] guy was using egg – eggs for protein. The other guy was using the Promotor. I said, you get the same amount of Protein for one-seventh [1/7th] the cost, by putting in. I said, what’s your cost of eggs? What’s your cost of this? They were seven [7] times as much, you get the same amount of Amino Acids in from this. And this was way deficient in one [1] Amino Acid. So, when you calculate it out it was the Amino Acid that made the eggs much better. So, the problem is, if you look at how many grams of Amino Acids there are in a thousand [1,000] mili-liters, you’re only getting, that their recommended dose, which is fifteen [15] mili-liters per two [2] liters of syrup. Two [2] liters of syrup is a half a gallon. You’re only getting two [2] grams of Amino Acids. That’s two [2] grams is, we’re talking.

Which Pollen Supplements Perform The Best?

So, then I wanted to know which Pollen Subs on the market perform the best? And this was published in the, and it’s on my website. We setup a large yard in late August when things dry up in California.
Tested nine [9] different groups, so we had a Positive Control of Natural Pollen. I bought bee collected Pollen from a beekeeper from the foothills, it didn’t have any pesticides. Got that, sent it to a manufacturer Manlick [SP]. Stewart was generous enough to run it through his equipment, and make it into identical patties so I could use that. And then I had a negative control, whoops, that we fed no Protein to at all to see. This is a test of the experiment; any good experiment generally has a Positive and Negative Control. Then you can compare your results to either of those. Then I, Stewart was generous enough for all but one [1], to mix up all the formulations that I wanted. And then one [1] other manufacturer didn’t trust Stewart at all. So, he, I had a hard time getting his. He sent one, so, we tested Mega Bee, my Home Brew Formula, Bee Pro, Man [Inaudible] Bulk, which is sold in forty-five [45] pound boxes for chopping up. An Experimental Yeast Based one with a different yeast. And then Feed Bee there. We sat the yard up like this, we used cinder blocks to make landmarks to separate each group.
So that cause I didn’t care about tripping within the group, cause we’re looking at the groups. But I wanted to get groups separated here. Fed Pollen Patties continuously throughout the Trial. Fed Sugar Syrup almost continuously. Got visits, surprise visits, Head of President Ratia, the worldwide Beekeeper Association, Gilles Ratia stopped by to say, hi. This is a picture he took, from up there, he’s crazy for taking photographs. Lots of work making sure that every colony got the right feeding of the right patty, and the same sugar syrup and over months here. They I used a Apavara [SP] strip to make sure that they, that Varroa not an issue, and they gobbled up those, most of the patties. We ran it till September, man, I was getting worried. I couldn’t see any difference between the groups. Okay, except for they weren’t eating the Yeast Patties. The Yeast Patties, they did not like the Yeast Patties, either one of them. Then finally in October they starting to grow. These colonies started growing up, cause they all started at five [5] frame equalizer five [5] frames of bees. By November when we graded, this is what the brood looked like in the Negative Control Group. The Group was shot, there are no yellow larvae, no eggs, this colony was gonna go into Winter in really bad shape. So these are the Negative Controls. These would be the un-supplemented; they fed sugar syrup, but no Protein.

This is one of the better Pollen Subs right here. Look at the difference. Big patch of brood, lots of yellow larvae, lots of “jelly” in those larvae. This colony is going into Winter in really good shape.
A bunch of young bees are gonna be hatching out to be your Winter bees. I said, Man, I’m gonna finally see some differences here.

Then we moved to a lower, a Winter low elevation, carefully looking on the map, so there wouldn’t be any Alder trees within flight range to get January pollen. I had no idea how far the bees would fly, they’re flying to Alder trees. What they did have is a ton of beebread. But what we saw with this beebread, and we see this for several years. We could never understand why this fluorescent orange beebread, the colonies would all go downhill with all this beebread. And I looked at it under the scope, and it looks like this. And Eric Mussin [SP] and I, where we had we were looking at CCD when he was a Nosema expert.
Something he said, Randy, why are all these fried eggs in all these sick colonies?

And I said, I don’t know, we asked other researchers, and nobody knew what the fried eggs were. So, same thing, we got fried eggs in here. And I put out the word to researchers all over the World, and finally one [1] guy from Spain said, Randy, look up your micese [SP], they’re rust fungus on the blackberry rust.
Which has been invading California, and sure enough they’re Rust Fungus Spores. There is a zero [0] Pollen in this beebread, zero.

My colonies right now look just like this. Like this Zero Pollen. When I looked at the research done from the Tucson Lab, some years ago, where they fed different types of Pollen to bees in cages. Feeding them Rust Fungus Spores was worse than feeding them nothing. It made the bees die faster. So, I finally solved the issue of, Why my bees go downhill with all this, what looks like beebread in there.

MALE: What is the plant you’re showing? Orange colored plant?

RANDY OLIVER: That’s Blackberry, but this is a fungus, a Rust Fungus on it.
The Rust Fungi has learned how to trick pollinators. They make a fluorescent color that the bees eyes pick up under ultra violet light, and they put a little sugar in it. So, the bees will gather it, and transmit the Rust Spores from one, and do a cross pollination of the Rust Spores. You have multiple sexes in Fungi.

So, this is to the, Fungus is an advantage to bees disadvantage. So that during the Winter, I didn’t want to overload these guys with liquid, so I started feeding them Drivert Sugar, which is a common use in California. Fed dry on the top to stimulate them. You see the pollen patties being eaten up.

This would be December twenty-third [23rd], when they start brooding up on their own. There’s no beebread whatsoever, but you can see lots of fresh wet larvae on, this was on the Ultra Bee.

And then the Alder Pollens started coming in. The bees flew to the nearest creek, it was like four [4] miles away. And started bringing in Alder Pollen. Now somebody asked me earlier about Maple and stuff. If you look at any bee book, it says, Oh, the tree pollens are of poor nutritional value. And I check it, and every bit, it was one hundred [100] fed Alder Pollen for a month. Because of the drought, none of the weeds grew at all, bloomed at all. So, I checked it every week, it was one hundred percent [100%] Alder Pollen. No other pollens coming in at all. So, the Negative Control Group, which went into the Winter in terrible nutritional shape, had nothing but Alder Pollen coming in. You with me now?

Here’s a test of Alder Pollen. And you see the they stored plenty of it. And here is a Negative Control, this colony is down to one and a half [1 ½] frames of bees, and look at what, you tell me whether Alder Pollen is nutritious or not?

We finally graded all the hives at Almond Bloom; you can see the trees blooming right in here. And here’s the Pre Distribution right here. Of the Natural Pollen Group, the red line in the middle, that was your Average Strength for all the hundred and whatever colonies there were in the Trial. Every one in the Natural Pollen Fed ones were at Average Strength or above. In the Negative Controls every one was an Average Strength or below. The chance of that happening by chance is one in less than ten thousand [10,000]. So that validated the experiment of design, so I was really happy about that.

Cause I was wondering. Here was the Final Results, and these are on my website. We’ve only got about a minute left. I want to show you one last thing here. Look right here, this is Natural Pollen. Oh, and by the time, when the Alder came in, all the colonies took off. So, the only results that were of value were here. But look at what the Negative Controls did, they did went downhill. The Alder came in, it took an almost a month to recover. And they they just started growing like crazy.

Of the Zero of the colonies Negative Controls made it to grade for Almonds. Of the top ones, seventeen [17] out of eighteen [18] mad it to Almonds. It was a huge difference. But what I want to see, these two [2] right here, these two [2] products took off like gang busters early on, and then crashed later on. There was apparently some [Inaudible] in the nutrient. The bees benefited from all the Protein initially.
But after, okay, this is Liebig’s Law right here.

Limiting Nutrients: Liebig’s Law

That the Growth of plants or animals are limited by the One Limiting Nutrient. Once you supply that, then they’ll be up to the next Limiting Nutrient. So, something happened here, that all that Protein allowed these colonies just to take off. But when they ran out of the one Limiting Nutrient that Natural Pollen had, they went down below quite a bit from the Natural Pollen.

So, even though these, so for Short Term Feeding these are probably really good Pollen Subs. Cause you would not be able to keep bees alive indefinitely on them, because of that lack.