Pass the Pollen, Honey

          

I watched a video about pollen extraction by Oliver of MicrobeHunter fame yesterday and thought it might be fun to duplicate what he did on his live-stream. He essentially put a small (2 ml) sample of honey with about 10 ml of water into a 15 ml vial and thoroughly mixed up the two into solution. Then about a 5 minute spin in a centrifuge at 4000 RPM, pour off the liquid and drop the pellet onto a slide with cover-slip. The result was a number of different pollen grains and at least one insect part, which according to Oliver, at one time belonged to a bee. All the pollen cells I found were in the range of 7 to 40 um long.

 

   

 

  

I also tried stacking a couple of the images with Picolay.

 

And here is the insect part, ostensibly from a bee. The piece is about 1/10 mm long.