Pollen microscopy for beekeepers

About my flower pollen library, consisting of many Google Photo Albums

 I have collected pollen from > 600 flower species, cultivars, or hybrids, grown in the Puget Sound Region (mostly in North Seattle area, WA, USA), and photographed under microscope (800x).

 I have not made a single pollen library yet; currently, pollen photos are organized in many Google Photo Albums. Each album includes related plants.

 

How to access each pollen album

A. From plant lists (may not work in the desktop version of Chrome web browser, but works in Safari)​: Open any one of the plant lists (best, all, winter, spring 1, spring 2, summer 1, summer 2, fall). Find the plant of interest and open the link in the 6th column. 

B. From the downloaded spreadsheet: Download the plant list of Puget Sound Lowlands (plus some alpine species). Open the file in Excel, Numbers, and etc, find the plant of interest and open the link in the 6h column.

C. From the plant list at the bottom of this page, in alphabetical order of Latin names.

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Using the pollen library to identify your bee pollen

 My pollen library includes the majority of honey bee-friendly plants that grow in Pacific Northwest of America, except uncommon garden plants. I think you can also find many plants that grow in northern states of central and eastern US, Canada, UK, western-central-eastern Europe. However, plants that only grow in USDA Zone 9 -10 areas (central and southern Florida, southern Louisiana, southern Texas, southwestern coast of California, Hawaii, southern Europe and etc), are not included.

 Identification to species is usually not possible, except when the species of interest does not have close relatives in the area (e.g., tulip poplar, Douglas fir, English ivy, and etc) or the species is far more abundant than other similar looking species (e.g., dandelion in winter, cherry plum in early spring, bigleaf maple, red-osier dogwood, English holly, Pacific willow in May, Himalayan blackberry, Japanese knotweed, jewelweed, and etc).

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Collecting bee pollen

 I have collected bee pollen from hind legs of dead bees and from varroa mite monitoring boards. I have never used pollen traps but they should work too. I usually analyze pollen within a few days of collection. Wet samples tend to give poor results, but overly-dry samples may still be used by adding some water. 

 Record pollen color before microscopic analysis. Place pollen chunks on a white paper and take a photo under bright light. It probably looks darker than the same pollen on a honey bee, but may still help you to identify the source plant.

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Mounting pollen samples and shooting photos under microscope

 Sample preparation and mounting methods greatly affect how pollen grains look under microscope. To use this pollen library as reference, please prepare your bee pollen as follows.

1. Place a chunk of bee pollen on a slide glass.

2. Put a small drop of glycerin (aka glycerol, available at drugstores) beside the pollen.

3. Place a coverglass and smear pollen lightly.

4. Immediately take pictures, within a half minutes (some pollen grains cannot retain their shapes in glycerin).

5. Reuse slide glasses and coverglasses after washing/drying, if you wish.

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Microscopes

 You do not need to spend thousands of dollars on a microscope. I use 'plugable 800x Inverted Digital Optical USB Microscope', bought from Amazon at $80 in 2017 (unfortunately discontinued), connected to a computer. I think similar kinds which can be connected to smartphones are available around $100. Look for kid's microscope with USB connection. I also bought other accessories from Amazon, such as slide & cover glasses and a calibration slide.

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Other online pollen libraries (to effectively use them, your samples should be prepared according to their methods)

Pollen wiki  : Contains over 2000 species of pollen images. Google translation to English is available. 

Pollen pictures (Discoverlife.org) : Not as organized as Pollen Wiki, but still helpful.

Australian pollen and spore atlas: Includes tropical species.

Pollen grains of Canadian honey plants: 

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Other links

Pollen (Wikipedia)

Pollen shapes

Pollen Grain Surface Pattern Terminology

Pollen.com: monitors airborne pollen in your area. I think they only report species known as allergens.