From what I’ve learnt, forager bees returning to the hive will hand off nectar to the house bees, but will drop the pollen to be collected and stored whenever convenient. Is this correct?
My question is in regards to constructing screened bottom boards. I don’t want the pollen falling through the screen so I’m wondering how far to continue the solid landing past the entrance.
How far inside the entrance are the bees dropping their pollen?
Thanks.
I have quite a few screened bottom hives- and I don’t see much pollen falling through to the cover board below. So I don’t think the bees just drop the pollen on the floor at all. In fact I have seen bees with pollen on the their legs going and putting it directly into the cells where it is needed on the edges of the brood.
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Agree with above post. The bees are not dropping a lot of pollen. I make entrance go into hive 3/4 inch. Just enough to staple hardware cloth. Works for me.
Thanks for your answer, and perfect timing. Im in the shed right now with rebates cut and three sides of the screen frame done, now I can finalise a length 
Thanks for that mate.
Yep. Nectar is handed over to be further processed by more bees but pollen is put into the cell by the bee collecting it.
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I collected pollen from 2 hives over a 24 hour period. There were 9 different pollen colours. The only pollen I find on the coreflute currently are from acacia fimbriata. So my thinking is, the bees reject certain pollen when they find enough with better nutritional value.
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Are you sure it is pollen you are seeing, maybe it is small pieces of capping wax. I have screened bottom boards and haven’t seen pollen on them so far.
I agree with the others that the bee that collects the pollen puts it into a cell for storage.
Get ready for an early spring and likely swarming, I am extracting honey and doing splits that I was thinking I would do in about 6 weeks time.
Regards
I’m not seeing anything on my existing screen bottom board, I’m just making a new sloped one in anticipation of the flow super going onto my cute hive very shortly. Just dotting the i’s and crossing t’s.
Your not wrong about the production currently, I installed a four frame nuc 17 days ago and they’ve built out the three foundation frames and are halfway through two of the three foundationless frames.
With 2 1/2 frames of capped brood on Saturday I thought I’d better get myself sorted. Not bad for winter 
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Funny I’m still smiling at that, could have been worse though…
Nah. 
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I am guess you climate at Caboolture is not that much different to me. I have already done splits and averaged taking 2 frames of honey from all my hives just to give them room to store more honey over the winter…
We can easily overlook that our ‘winter’ is similar to others ‘summer’, but this is a good time of year for pollen and honey coming into the hive in excess here.
Regards Brad