The Pollen Spotting Game: Learning to Read Where Bees Have Been
My top tip: Enjoy noticing pollen!
There's a game I play during the beekeeping season that never gets boring – I spot the pollen on a bee's back legs and guess where they've been foraging!
The different colours suggest different plants, and once you start noticing, you can't stop.
The Colours Tell Stories
Watch a bee closely - really closely, so you can see their back legs - and you'll see bright clumps of pollen packed into what are called pollen baskets.
Orange. Grey. Red. Pale green. Sometimes even white or deep purple. Each colour tells you which flowers that bee has visited in the last hour or so. It's detective work. Reading the landscape through what the bees are carrying home.
Red pollen often comes from horse chestnut or poppy. Orange suggests dandelions or gorse. Grey usually means willow or apple blossom. Bright yellow could be rapeseed or buttercups.
It's not exact science - you need to know what's blooming nearby to make an educated guess and don’t forget bees fly for up to 3 miles way beyond the boundaries of your immediate area.
It’s endlessly absorbing and means you spot what’s flowering as you go about your daily business.
It's the oils in the pollen that create all those different colours. Different plants, different oils, different pigments. The bees don't care about the colour - they care about the protein content. But for us watching, those colours are windows into where they've been. For example:
· Early April: Look for grey pollen (willow, one of the first trees to flower) and white or pale yellow (snowdrops, crocuses).
· Mid-April: Watch for red pollen appearing as horse chestnuts start blooming. Those big sticky buds open into spectacular candle-shaped flowers and bees love them.
· May: Orange pollen as dandelions take over. Also watch for the deep orange-red from poppies if you're near fields
How Bees Collect Pollen
In the hive the baby bees are sending out pheromones to tell the older forager bees what they need to grow to the next stage – it’s effectively a shopping list of the proteins! The nectar is the sweet carbohydrate that the bees store in the hive for energy giving food when the flowers are all gone.
As they move from flower to flower, they brush that pollen into the baskets on their back legs, packing it into bright clumps you can see.
One bee can carry about 10-30% of her body weight in pollen. That's like you or me carrying 7-20kg on our backs while flying.
The adults mostly eat honey for energy, but the young need pollen to develop properly.
The Hayfever Connection
Here's where pollen in honey gets interesting for people who suffer from hayfever.
Some customers swear that local raw honey helps with hayfever symptoms. The theory is that small amounts of local pollen in the honey help your body adjust to local allergens - like a very gentle form of exposure therapy.
The science isn't conclusive. It's almost impossible to set up a proper scientific experiment to prove it because you can't control all the variables. But many people tell us it works for them.
It does depend what's making you sneeze though. Grass pollen won't be in honey - bees don't visit grass flowers. Trees that are wind-pollinated like birch and cedar won't be there either.
I think much of the benefit might be down to raw honey's anti-inflammatory and prebiotic properties, helping to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. But whatever the mechanism, if it helps, it helps!
What we know for certain: it needs to be raw honey with all the pollen, active enzymes etc still present. Ultra-filtered, pasteurised supermarket honey won't do anything.
Buying local honey from your local beekeeper is ideal. But if you can't find that, don't worry. Our honeys come from bees kept in woodlands, by fields, and in gardens across the country. With bees flying up to 3 miles to forage and the UK being such a diverse patchwork of landscapes, the variety of pollens in each honey, wherever it's from, is huge.
You're getting exposure to British pollens and all the benefits of raw honey which is probably close enough.
Why This Matters
The pollen-spotting game isn't just fun (though it is that). It's also a way of paying attention.
Noticing what the bees are carrying. Learning which plants they prefer. Understanding how the landscape around you changes through the seasons based on what colours appear on bees' legs.
It connects you to your immediate surroundings in a way that's easy to miss if you're not looking.
And once you start noticing, you see it everywhere. Different colours throughout the year. Different plants coming into bloom. The rhythm of the seasons written on bees' back legs.
That's what Hive & Keeper is really about. Not just honey. But discovery. Learning. Paying attention to things most people overlook and finding them extraordinary.
Next time you see a bee, look at her back legs. See what colour she's carrying. Make a guess where she's been.
And once you start, you won't be able to stop.