How To Collect Bee Pollen - How to Collect Pollen - Collecting Pollen

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey and welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to be looking at the Abello pollen floor. Damien from Abello kindly sent me this pollen floor to take a look at, do a bit of a review on it, see what some of the features are and give him some feedback. The actual pollen floor isn't designed for the UK market, so it's one of licensed proprietary items and I believe it's designed for of their hives that they sell on the continent, but it's very similar dimensions to the National Hive. So he's kind of given me the hive to take a look at, see if it will work with any of this Suyenti and the other Abello kit and the wooden kit that I have. We'll do a full review later in the year, so we'll kind of put a colony onto the pollen floor, we'll give it maybe 2 days or something and see how much pollen we can actually collect. The reason that I'm looking to get a few pollen floors this year is that I came— I was very low on pollen last year when I was trying to do my queen So I kind of had to resort to going through the colonies and trying to find pollen frames. And to find that perfect pollen frame is very time-consuming, and sometimes it doesn't even exist. So I kind of resorted to putting pollen sub into some of the frames, and that works okay, and it's not too bad to put the pollen sub in there. But obviously it's always best if you can use real kind of natural pollen from your own hives. You don't want to buy pollen unless it's, um, unless it's been treated to kind of stop the spread of any disease. So The best thing you can use is pollen from your own hives, and second best is Pollen Sub, and then don't use anything else apart from that. You'll also notice today that I'm wearing my new GoPro, so videos going forward I will have my GoPro on. This should really help kind of later on in the season when we come to do inspections, because as I turn you'll kind of get that first-person view of what I'm actually doing, as opposed to me talking directly to the camera. So I will put a box in this corner here and you'll kind of be able to get the, the first-person view of what's going on in this review as well. So again, the aim of the review today is just take a look at the box, how it's been designed, some of the potential limitations that I think it has, and the functionality as well. And then we'll follow that up later on in the year with a full proper review of a working hive. So on to the review. Now the first thing that strikes me about this box is it's very well made. It's solid, it's made of the same dense polystyrene that Abelo use For a lot of their hives. It comes pre-painted. It comes with an entrance reducer, but to be honest, I think when I use it, I won't be using the entrance reducer, so we'll pop that over there. One of the main things to note about the hive though, and it's potentially something that I'm going to need to work around straight away, is that there's actually a lip all the way around it here. Now I suspect that that's designed for one of their hives where they have a lip and that would sit perfectly on it. Obviously because we're not using the same format of hive, we're going to have to do a bit of a modification to that. So what I'd probably do is I'll get a bit of ply baton and I'll just kind of glue that in place around here, and then that will mean that that will sit completely flush then, and I can put my Suyenti boxes, my Abelo boxes, and everything on it. The dimensions of it are ever so slightly bigger than a Suyenti box. It is a square, but like I say, it's ever so slightly bigger. But unless you've got the exact same hive that this is built for, You will need to do a slight mod to get it to work. Now I've already tried just popping the Suenti box on there and seeing how it fits and it will work without the mod. So the internal dimension of the Suenti box will fit and sit on directly on this lip and give you a tight seal. So what I would do is I would pop it on like that and I would just ratchet it down and that will work. So if you're looking kind of for a very simple easy option that will work. But for me, for the sake of kind of just putting a couple of pieces of batten on there, And gluing it and maybe hitting a couple of goes with a nail gun on it, that will, that will resolve the problem completely. So a very, very simple mod. Now I'm just going to turn it around this way just so you can see a bit better on the GoPro. So it has quite a deep base, it has a landing board sitting in here, and then it has a very good size entrance. Now I know that the entrance reducer came along with this as well, but when you're collecting for pollen, the last thing you want is any obstacles for them to kind of knock pollen off on the way. So I will completely remove the entrance reducer and leave that nice big hole like that. Moving on to the inside of the hive then, you can see that it has a pull-out drawer. So this comes out of the hive like that. We'll just pop that there. Now that is made completely of polystyrene. At first I thought that this element here would be made of plastic, but it's not. It is all polystyrene. So just be aware that that potentially could be quite fragile. You're not going to be— it's not going to be very often that you take that drawer out, so it's not going to cause an issue, but it's just worth noting that entire mould there is a single piece of polystyrene, and then you've obviously got your additional tray screwed on there. So if it did break, it would be a very easy fix. I would just kind of make my own plastic tray or make my own, probably a little ply tray to go in there, but at the moment it's fine and there's no reason to think that that will break. So the tray slots in like that, and then what it has on the inside is this board. Now this board has mesh underneath like that. It's made out of, um, quite thin ply, but it's a very solid construction. And then on the top you have these equally spaced plastic holes. Now also on that side there, that is where the entrance is. So if you slide that back in— So So the bees will fly in here. If I just get the GoPro in, you can see that's the entrance that they've got there. The bees will then navigate up through that entrance, turn up 90 degrees, and come through these holes. As they come through the holes, it will knock the pollen, pollen baskets off their legs, and then it will fall underneath into this tray. So it's a very simple design. I'm really kind of excited to get a colony on it and try it. I understand that you can potentially get kind of, I mean, like a kilo of pollen within like 2-3 days on it. One thing to note is you definitely need to do this at the right time of the year. A, there needs to be a very, very good strong flow on. I mean, there needs to be kind of an ample amount of pollen for the bees to go out and forage, but B, and more importantly, there needs to be sufficient pollen within the colony already before you put the floor on. Pollen is such a vital source for the bees in terms of kind of brood rearing that if you were to starve them of all of their pollen for any kind of extended period, you could cause severe problems within the hive. So check that there's sufficient pollen within the hive before you do it. Check that it's a very, very strong colony. You want it on your absolute strongest colony, and don't go for any longer than, say, 24 to 48 hours at the absolute max. So then back to the general construction of the hive then. It's very similar to some of the Abello hives that I've seen recently where you have the kind of mixture of the polystyrene and then the plastic mating faces here. So all of this element around the top here is like a molded plastic and then that's actually set within the poly. So it is a very, very solid construction. So that's it, there's not much more to say about the floor at the moment. I just wanted to give you a quick look around it. It's quite difficult when you're on the website to kind of have a look and get the dimensions and get a feel for kind of the construction, so I think a video is always a bit more helpful where you can see where the inserts and the drawers come in and come out. Like I said, I'll do a full review as soon as the pollen starts coming back in and I've got some good strong colonies, and we'll see how much pollen we can get. So thank you very much for watching. Please subscribe to our channel. Now that we've got the GoPro, you'll see kind of lots of different videos coming out. Around here at the moment it's still 6 or 7 degrees. It's very quiet in terms of kind of doing anything with the bees, but the snowdrops are starting to come out. On the warm days the bees are active, they are working. We're still not going into the colonies and taking a look at anything though because it's just far too cold and there's no benefit to doing that, but stay tuned, there'll be plenty of that coming up in the season. So thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.