@Valli… Champion 
Many thanks.
@Valli… Champion 
Many thanks.
Thank Vali,
If anyone on here could. You seem to pull stuff like this off ! I don’t have resources yet like this. At 71 years I doubt I ever will but nice to have others that do !
Thankz again,
Gerald
Course was at a convention. pretty basic but I picked up the kit you need to stain and measure the pollen and a couple of good books. I’ll be able to have a look at the pollen in my honey ![]()
That flower looks like a Red Dead Nettle and the pollen from that is red.
Lovely picture
It’s probably from a real plant, but just to put things in perspective, the local retired bee inspector (we don’t have one in Nebraska anymore) said he was inspecting some hives one day and the bees were bringing in blue pollen. He was surprised because he didn’t think anything was blooming at the time let alone something with blue pollen. So he asked the farmer what he thought they were gathering. The farmer said, I’ll have to show you because you won’t believe me. So he takes him to an old Ford tractor with fading and peeling blue paint and there are the bees scraping off the paint and putting it in their pollen baskets…
That’s an oldie but a goodie, I was told a similar story a long time ago.
Hi Kirsten, Sorry I can’t help you. However, when I was operating my pollen trap, there was some purple to black pollen being dropped off. The flavor of that pollen wasn’t nice at all. It seemed that the lighter the color, the nicer the flavor.
Looks like red deadnettle, which definitely has red pollen. I wrote a short post about it here: Honey bee forage: red deadnettle
Like MnMs honey
…
Looks like it is in the nettle/mint plant family. ![]()
This one is a really good find Valli, haven’t seen it before, thanks 
Thanks will have a look
Can’t access any of your links? But had a look at Red deadnettle & I have seen something like that down in one of the reserves, will have a closer look tomorrow. Is that what they also call Henbit?
There isn’t a lot of pollen around it seems at the moment, not surprising really considering the weather we’ve had. It was only on one day that this hive was bringing it in, & again not a lot of it, about 5 cells worth in actual hive.
It’s interesting about the lighter colour pollen being a better flavour, will have to do more research into it, but imagine the colour relates to proteins etc. that make it up. I wonder if there’s any relation to flower scent as well?
Some of the pdfs you need to download to look at - sometimes you can Cache the url underneath but it does not always work.
Just plain internet searches but I do have a knack for it ![]()
Sorry about the link, but it seems to work from here. Anyway, red deadnettle has a number of pseudonyms including purple deadnettle, purple archangel, and henbit. The scientific name is Lamium purpureum.
Thanks Rusty, its not just the link on here. For some reason yesterday I couldn’t access any of your site, I have before so will try again later.
I keep forgetting to ask, did your Eucryphias flower this year? I remember you thought it might be too cold? I was reminded because the ones I have are covered in what I thought were flower buds, but now weather warming up am discovering are leaf buds. Hope I get some flowers too!
Yes yes yes…flowers this year, I was soooooo pleased.
My Aralia spinosa I got as a sucker from my sis-in-law five years ago has colonised the island in the apiary pond and was a riot of plumes covered in bees for the first time this year.

Depending on where you are they might be getting it from Kings Park Callistemon which is flowering at the moment. They are quite a bit more red than shown in this photo, and my bees are returning with red pollen.
Bottlebrush are flowering at the moment in WA, and that is really red pollen, do you have any of those around you?