Day 13: Installing pollen traps

Today we installed four pollen traps onto top-bar hives. The design is such that the structure sits on the front ledge of the entrance to the hive. The bees fly into the entrance and have to climb through mesh in order to get inside. The mesh scrapes off pollen into a drawer that can be pulled out for pollen collection. Installing the traps was relatively easy. We had to put two nails into the sides of the hives to tie the trap on with wire. We had to figure out issues as we went, such as filling gaps to the entrance that the trap did not cover. We ended up using plastic bags and cardboard to fill in any gaps that would leave room for the bees to enter in a different way.
Looking at the hives for placement:

 Sideview of the attachment:

 Awesome in-action photo of the bees figuring out how to get in (you can see the pollen on their legs):

 Completed installation:

 Cody, Kristie, and I went back afterwards to install two more:

 Here, you can see the black plastic bag we used to fill in the gap to the entrance:

 Cody placing the drawer in:

 Completed installation on the Tanzanian hive:

We thought about certain issues that might arise in installation. One was gaps which we figured out pretty quickly. The other was alternative entrances being a problem. The Tanzanian hive lacked top-bars in the back and so left room for bees to enter under the cover. We will see if the bees start using that space as an entrance instead of where the trap is (rendering the trap ineffective). It was really neat that we visited the previous traps and saw 15-20 pieces of pollen already in the drawer. Tom says this is a slow rate, but we will check again tonight how much is collecting.
In the kitchen, we had a conversation about pollen. I asked if the pollen was transferred into cells by them scraping it off their legs or ingesting it. The answer is scraping and then adding nectar. They add more nutrients to the pollen first and then pack it into cells with their head. Pollen that is collected without their ingestion (collected in the pollen traps) is lower in protein. Apparently bees will reject lower quality pollen if they have higher quality available. This might happen if we tried to make our own pollen patties out of pollen collected by the traps. Quality also declines with extended storage. Also, Taylor looked up how people eat pollen and found mostly negative results. People would ingest it to prevent allergies and have severe reactions and things like that. But, there is still a market for selling pollen so we will see what we do with it.