In this instructional video, the presenter demonstrates the Abelo pollen trap and explains how beekeepers can diversify their income by harvesting pollen. He walks through a typical hive setup, shows how the trap is installed on a brood floor, and details its simple design—including a bypass option and a built‑in drone escape. The presenter shares a personal assembly mistake (missing board) and how he adapted the trap with a bamboo stick. He then shows the trap in action, describing how bees are forced through small holes that strip pollen from their legs into a collection tray. Yield expectations are discussed: even a modest colony can fill the tray within an hour, and a strong colony could produce a substantial amount in about 24 hours. A strong caution is given that pollen is vital protein for the colony; the trap should not be left on longer than 24 hours and colonies need a recovery period before reuse. The presenter samples the fresh pollen, describing its earthy, spring‑like flavor, and promotes pollen as a niche market product. The video concludes with a call to action for a “14‑Day Beekeeper” course aimed at beginners.
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something very cool, the Abelo pollen trap. So my advice to all beekeepers is to diversify as much as you possibly can. Don't put all your eggs in the honey in barrels basket. Try wholesale honey, try retail honey, try beeswax, queens, nucs, whatever your bees can produce in a sustainable way. You can market that as a product, and there's lots and lots of demand for some of these niche beekeeping products. Pollen is undoubtedly one of them. So this pollen trap is super cool. You just take off a little door like that and you pull out a tray and the bees have done all of the hard work for you. So before we show you the pollen, let me get inside this colony from the very top. Now, in a normal beehive, the setup is very simple. You have a crown board and then you have some shallow boxes like this where you store your honey. And it's quite early on in the season, so we had some foundation on here, but we've got bees working upstairs in these boxes. So this is a live beehive. Now although bees will take pollen into the beehive, into the brood nest, and occasionally they will store it upstairs in these super frames here, it's very, very difficult to get it out without damaging the comb, so you definitely don't want to do that. So any pollen that comes into the supers here just goes through the standard honey processing, which makes harvesting pollen from bees coming in a little bit of a challenge. You have to think slightly differently, and this colony here is set up like that on a pollen trap floor. It's really simple. The bee comes in through the front of the beehive. It has no alternative way in to get into the beehive, to get into the brood nest, other than going through some very carefully sized holes, which knocks the pollen off the bee's legs and into the basket below. I'll take this brood box off now and I'll show you the pollen trap, and I'll show you exactly how it works. So the design is very, very simple, and there's a nice bypass option on here as well. So this floor here can go into the closed position like this. You can just kind of pin it into place, and then in the closed position, there's this little hole where the bees can kind of just come in and go out. And this is also a really useful drone escape as well, to make sure that no drones get caught up in the mix here. But I tend to leave this pollen trap just completely open like that. And then if you come up over here, Zane, I'll show you exactly what's going on and how the pollen is collected. So you know how I am terrible at assembling things in order. I actually made a massive mistake on this pollen trap here. This little board enables you to control the flow through this gap over here. You can have it in underneath this rebate and it either goes forward to close this gap here and thus force the bees through these little holes, or you can open it back up again so then this floor can just be used as a standard floor all the way throughout the year. I glued and screwed this front piece on mistakenly and left this board out, which means that this floor can't be used as a regular floor, but I just move it around different colonies to get different batches of pollen. So the way that my one works is I jammed a bamboo stick in there permanently blocking it, and then it's these holes here. This is how you catch the pollen. So if you come right in here, Zane, and look and zoom right in on this bee, is exactly how the pollen trap works. The bee can only— Oh, I see. just about fit through. There is enough room for the bee to get through, but there is not enough room for the bee to take any pollen through, which means that the pollen just drops off as the bee comes through and goes into that basket below. So you can see how the bees are forced to come up through those holes, and they'll just make their way up through the beehive and deliver whatever nectar they've got, and all of the pollen will have just fallen down into this basket here. Now it is amazing just how much pollen you can gather in A few hours of pollen gathering. And this one here has literally been on for about an hour, and it's not a very strong colony. It's a colony that's got a brood box full and only half a super. So if you put this one here on a big strong colony with a few supers on, you could fill that up, I would say, in about 24 hours. Maybe it would only be half full, but believe me, when you get big strong colonies, the amount of pollen that you get out of them on these trays is phenomenal. One word of caution though, and a really big word of caution. This protein source is vital for the colony, for the brood nest to carry on expanding. Don't leave your pollen floor on for anything longer than 24 hours. And then if you've taken 24 hours' worth of pollen out of it, give it a couple of weeks to recover. Don't keep on going back to the same colony. This is their lifeblood. This is what they need to survive. This is what they need to grow. So only take a really small sample of it. But Zane tried this earlier on as well. You can eat pollen just like that. And it's truly magnificent. It tastes like nothing else. That's what you said, Zane, wasn't it? It tastes like nothing else. You could describe it as a little bit soily, and when I've tasted pollen before that's in jars, I always find it maybe a little bit stale. But this is a superfood, and this is something that I could eat, get in the habit of eating. It tastes to me just kind of of the forest, of the woodland, of the moorland, and it definitely tastes of spring. So I definitely recommend this pollen trap from Abelo. It's well made, Don't leave it on your beehives for too long, but it is a way of diversifying your beekeeping business and producing something that not many other beekeepers produce very well. Pollen could be the next best thing. See if it works for you, get some on your colonies, and get harvesting in 2026. If you enjoyed that video and you want to get into beekeeping, check out our course 14-Day Beekeeper that will turn you from a beginner, a novice, into a competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
