A study of honey bee bread in Lancashire and Cumbria bee hives showed that in some samples nearly 90 per cent of the pollen came from Himalayan balsam
A study of honey bee bread in Lancashire and Cumbria bee hives showed that in some samples nearly 90 per cent of the pollen came from Himalayan balsam. Honey bees love the invasive plant Himalayan balsam and eat it like 'fast food' but, like humans, they thrive better on a varied diet. A study of honey bee bread in Lancashire and Cumbria bee hives showed that in some samples nearly 90 per cent of the pollen came from the invasive plant Himalayan balsam. Bee bread is made up of pollen stored in cells in the hive, and is the basic component of food for bee larvae and young bees, while older bees eat nectar in the form of honey. The study , carried out by scientists at Lancaster University, uses next generation sequencing to analyse 52 samples of bee bread from 26 bee hives to identify which plant species the pollen came from and the nutrient make up of each sample. Each bee bread sample contained between six and 35 distinct pollen species. Published in the journal Oecologia, the study, shows that the majority of pollen bees collect comes from 16 plant genera, including clover (Trifolium), balsam (Impatiens), blackberry (Rubus), sycamore (Acer) and thistles (Cirsium).
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