Keep 'Em Flying (Bee Dept.)

Though the gods drank nectar, pollen would have been far better for them: pollen (which is a male reproductive spore) is a startlingly rich source of proteins and fats, contains carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. This discovery was announced last week by James I. Hambleton, chief U.S. apiarist at Beltsville, Md. Apiarist Hambleton and co-workers have invented a trap to collect pollen by the ton: a screen doorstep in front of a beehive, which brushes pollen off the hairy legs of bees and drops it into a box below. As much as 70 lb. of pollen can be gathered each year from a single hive.

Texas researchers last year found that royal jelly, the substance secreted and fed to the queen bees by the workers, is two and a half to six times richer in pantothenic acid--a vitamin of the B complex--than yeast or liver. Hambleton believes that pollen will prove to have a similar content, may soon become a major source of vitamin extracts.

His pollen trap also enables apiarists to increase their swarms. In winter bees subsist on stored-up honey and pollen. A beekeeper who carefully gleans bee-dropped pollen, then feeds it back to his swarms in more generous quantities than the bees themselves would store it, will find his insects from 25 to 100% more numerous at winter's end.

Department of Agriculture officials this year are urging beekeepers to increase their swarms. Reason: sugar shortage. Signs of the bee's new importance:

> The Department of Agriculture announced that every effort would be made to increase the 1942 honey harvest by 50% over 1941's 206,591,000 lb. (equivalent of about 1% of last year's sugar consumption). Instead of exporting honey to Europe, the U.S. is now importing millions of pounds from Latin America.

> "Chaotic . . . frenzied . . . !" was beekeepers' description of the honey market, as bakers, soft-drink and ice-cream makers swarmed in like flies to buy honey, which is only 75% sugar yet tastes sweeter than ordinary sugar because 40% of the sugar is in the levulose form.

> WPB promised that bees could have at least 80% of the common sugar they ate last year. Reason: bees must often be kept alive on sugar in nectarless seasons before the orchards bloom and between the blossoming of orchards and fields. Ten pounds of sugar then may insure the gathering of some 200 lb. of honey later.

> Honey was listed among the 14 essential foods which may be packed in tin cans (5 lb.-size and bigger) in unlimited quantities.

> Beeswax needs of the Army and Navy, running into thousands of pounds yearly, have been doubled (so has the price). Beeswax is smeared as waterproofing over shells, airplane surfaces, ropes, canvas, gaskets, etc. To up war production, apiarists will have to let their bees build more combs (instead of having them refill combs from which the honey has been centrifugally extracted). This will be costly: bees must eat 12 to 15 lb. of their honey to secrete one pound of wax.

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