SEASONAL VARIABILITY IN POLLEN COLORING OF Apis mellifera AND STINGLESS BEES

• DOI: 10.22533/at.ed.9733132324082

• Palavras-chave: bee pollen, coloring, ANOVA, season, bee species.

• Keywords: bee pollen, coloring, ANOVA, season, bee species.

• Abstract:

  Currently, bee pollen has stood out due to its nutritional characteristics and more recently due to its functional properties. Bee pollen has a variable composition and color, usually associated with its botanical or geographic origin. Therefore, it is essential to standardize its production and processing to improve its use in industrialized products or to simply offer the consumer a more uniformly colored product. In order to assess how the foraging behavior of different bee species and seasonality may affect bee pollen color, a nested factor ANOVA was applied to instrumental color data of 243 pollen samples collected by Apis bee species. mellifera and stingless bees (Melipona marginata, Melipona quadrifasciata, Scaptotrigona bipunctata and Tetragona clavipes) over four seasons from June 2018 to May 2019. The results showed that the coloration has a greater contribution from the bee species, but can also be influenced by the seasonality and characteristic flora of the producing region. Furthermore, significant correlations were observed between the L*, a* and b* color coordinates of the bee pollen samples. Correlations may be associated with the predominant contribution of certain plant species due to the availability of flora in the producing region and the foraging habit of bee species. These results are important for the development of national beekeeping and meliponiculture, since they provide subsidies for the production of bee pollen with a more uniform color in the industry of this sector.