Bee pollen: the colony's protein

What a colony uses it for

Pollen supplies protein, lipids, sterols, vitamins and minerals — everything nectar does not. Nurse bees eat it to run the glands that produce brood food, and a colony without pollen stops rearing brood within days regardless of how much honey it holds. That is the single most useful thing to know about it.

A colony consumes something in the range of 20 to 40 kilograms of pollen a year. Foragers moisten grains with nectar and glandular secretions and pack them into the corbicula on the hind leg, which is why a pollen pellet is not pure pollen and why its colour identifies the plant.

Bee bread is not the same thing

Pollen stored in the comb is packed down, topped with honey and sealed, and it then undergoes lactic fermentation. The resulting bee bread is more digestible and more stable than raw pollen, and it is what larvae are actually fed. Bee pollen sold as a supplement is the trapped pellet, not the fermented store.

The evidence boundary

Bee pollen is genuinely nutritious — roughly 20 to 25 per cent protein, with a reasonable amino acid profile. The difficulty is dose. A typical supplement serving is a teaspoon or two, which contributes a trivial amount of protein against a daily requirement. It is food, and at the quantities people take it, it is a very small amount of food.