by Zafir Abou-Zamzam

The picture above is a sample of pollen taken from one of the yellow flowers abundant on campus (see end of post). In the photo, we can see the differentiated grains of pollen through the lens of the foldscope. The sample was taken at 10:30am on Friday, May 10, from a flower on the walkway west of Page house, about 15ft south of the southwest entrance of the building. The sample was obtained by rubbing a q-tip along the inside of the flower until a small amount of pollen was transferred. A slide was then prepared to view the sample.

A question I would want answered is: how many pollen can a bee carry at a given time? To answer this, we would first have to estimate the size of a pollen grain, and also the surface area of the part of the bee that carries pollen. We would then have to estimate the area of pollen coverage on the bee, and how many layers of pollen are able to stick together while being carried by the bee. The former could be found with a visual measurement, while the latter could potentially be measured by determining the thickness of the pollen-carrying area of the bee before and after picking up pollen. With all these values we could then estimate the amount of pollen carried.

A classic follow up question would then be: how much pollen is transferred between flowers by a bee? To measure this, we would have to measure the net amount of pollen on the bee before and after touching the flower, and also test in some other setting the amount of pollen the bee drops and picks up when moving along a flower. This could potentially be done in a lab setting with different flowers, where the pollen is colored differently on each flower, and bees move throughout.

A picture of the flower the sample was obtained from is below.

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