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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDvGFtU8vACTdri4709tF9ZK69ipuSRqJwohAEfM59MxBXZwpNGZwywMmyXfV3Q5gAzmauvjAwgu67svaf-2g4r8dQMMi9pstW0NHMS2fUc4ni3kB7aDBuD78D4YXKqZqAh54YcX2s3w6YQxcttPYzX5_zgcZybvTUVjIwqn-eERZ_e7FzACf35fr3PTg/w199-h200/clip_IMG_1285_crp.jpg)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPF2QSR_wZNJTXHabCDLgKTDfsirGVUzWbI-uHuYrvP2z-zNQLJYBesVsJgw4GV-a3iwJ4WLcLBIyTa0jVOUv27AlUTPH0j_Wil4-n6_f-OOfHaCiUImMh6GQuN06ME_KqV3aCOkavivJZDMx7Jf3zpiNDlmHffz7KqHoahlfjw_BaReXjaHmGqKHJV80/w199-h200/clip_IMG_1292_crp.jpg)
I also tried stacking a couple of the images with Picolay.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdJgTUhaAU0T024LYFJq5ewggnk3dknzkYlI2dwXRQHAgbegZ-tmQq33AfiPOevoazeAQZC1ChUpNwtozhQmBD2l7d70xfoY09Qys8_dwmmVP-sAMwdkl-qs9r1QCd2b6AMxEz-1vGwrUVgEJuay16NpMAaSYWUXK2-CP6CJ8ghajpm2oe5EcSt_DBhBs/s320/stk_pollen_2.jpg)
And here is the insect part, ostensibly from a bee. The piece is about 1/10 mm long.
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