Superfood Pollen

For bees, pollen is the only source of protein for feeding their brood. Wild bees feed it directly to their offspring. Honey bees serve it first to their queen. Only the royal jelly that she produces from it is then placed on the brood’s menu. This noble substance also owes its name to its royal origin: royal jelly.

To preserve pollen, bees chew it and add enzymes. This sets lactic acid fermentation in motion, similar to that of sourdough: the pollen is transformed into bee bread, known to beekeepers as perga. Covered by the bees with a thin layer of propolis and stored in special comb cells, it keeps for several months.

Pollen of Flowering Plants and Grasses

Der Pollen
Latin pollen — “fine flour” / “dust”

Pollen is the scientific term for flower dust. It is produced by the male flower and carried by the wind or by insects to other flowers of the same species. When it unites there with a female egg cell in the ovary, a seed is formed. From this seed, a new plant can grow.

The usually yellow pollen consists of many individual pollen grains. These are only 10 to 100 micrometres in size and have different characteristic shapes depending on the species and genus. Because pollen preserved in peatlands or in lake sediments can survive for thousands of years, biologists and geologists can use it to reconstruct the former climate of a region and the plants that once grew there.

Allergies

Of the roughly 3,000 plant species that grow in Austria, only about 20 are of significance for people with allergies. Around 1.5 million people are affected. Between 70 and 80 per cent of them react to grass pollen. But birch, hazel and ash pollen are also triggering allergies more and more frequently.

Pollen of Tree Species

* trigger allergies