Through research this winter and preparing my talk for the Wildflowers Women’s Homesteading Conference spring 2026, I came to understand how crucial a pollen supply is for a producing colony, and how the worker bees ration the supply especially in the spring before flowers are blooming and after the flowers have finished blooming in fall. Brood production is impacted greatly on the amount of pollen that comes in, but even more importantly, the consistency of the supply. Pollen is a necessary ingredient in both bee bread (the food fed to worker and drone larvae after the first 6 days of development) ‘worker jelly’ (a wondrous pure food from the nurse bees’ mandibular and hypopharygeal glands) and the infamous royal jelly, which is a special jelly secretion that is slightly different than the worker jelly, with a higher sugar content and different vitamin profile, which is used for not only raising queens, but feeding them throughout their lives. There is no physical way a queen can eat enough pollen to satisfy her calorie requirements, which may lay up to her body weight in eggs every day!! The growing brood is a ravenous mouth in the colony and drones also require a substantial amount, to which the worker bees feed, mouth to mouth. Finally the hard working foragers, who will first feel the brunt of a dearth, when it comes, as they are the first to get rationed.
Backing up to the beginning… when a worker bee emerges, she’s ‘born’ hungry. She heads over to the open cells of honey to satisfy her hunger and get some energy…but sugar is about all that honey can provide, so next, she finds the stored pollen. She must build her protein reserves in order to be able to produce all the wonderful secretions and feed for nursing young bees and queens in her youth, keep her immune system strong, and live long enough to complete the rest of her life cycle. She eats consistently for about 5 days until she ‘tanks out’, and her glands are mature, her body is fat, and she’s ready to produce royal jelly.
The point that every beekeeper needs to understand is that the real nutrition for the colony comes from pollen. Pollen provides proteins, fats, vitamins, sterols, minerals, and micronutrients that bees need for growth and health. Colonies need 30-100 pounds of pollen per year! Much of this is foraged through the summer, but it can help immensely to supplement pollen in spring (and fall, if needed) to stimulate strong brood production.
Pollen is typically eaten fairly quickly by nurse bees, but if it is stored for longer periods it may undergo lactic acid fermentation which may preserve it, similar to yogurt or sauerkraut. Bees will also store honey on top of pollen, to ‘save’ it for early spring or periods where there is no pollen forage at all.
Bees not only store pollen and honey in the cells of the comb, but also in their bodies, in the form of the incredible molecule, vitellogenin. This molecule allows the bee to store protein reserves, make royal jelly, promotes the longevity of queen and “winter” bees, is a part of their immune system, allows them to brood up in spring in the absence of pollen, and has an effect upon their foraging behavior. Amazing!! Vitellogenin is indeed the “Fountain of Youth” for the honeybee!
Pollen foraging by foragers is not only stimulated by the pheromones of the brood, but also the inventory of the pollen stores as is communicated by the foragers receiving their food from the nurse bees. The quality of the jelly that is shared from the nurses is directly related to their vitellogenin reserves. Even just a few days of rain can result in almost total loos of stored pollen, forcing the nurses to dig into their reserves. When protein levels drop, nurse bees will ration the jelly given to foragers, then neglect the young larvae, and feed those closer to being capped. If levels drop lower, nurses will cannibalize eggs and young larvae, ‘recycling’ the protein back into jelly for food, and may also cap over larvae sooner, resulting in lower emerging weight of the adult bee.
Winter
So the European honeybee, has figured out a way to store honey for the winter and protein in their bodies, in the vitellogenin reserves. The emerging bees in the fall, with the broodrearing curtailed and thus having no young bees to feed, store all that good food in their bodies and become ‘fat’, protein rich bees with strong immunity, thanks to the vitellogenin reserves and ready to face the winter, where they’ll survive on honey alone.
I’m going to finish this post with a quote from Randy Oliver of Scientific Beekeeping, one of my favorite sources of bee knowledge: “In summary, protein is precious to the honeybee colony, and its sole natural source is a mixture of plant pollens. Bees store reserves of protein in the bodies of house bees in the form of vitellogenin, and conserve those reserves zealously, by recovering them before house bees graduate to become field bees. Field bees thus give up the life-extending and immunicological benefits of vitellogenin. Protein is transferred within the colony from bee to bee by the sharing of vitellogenin produced by nurse bees. Vitellogenin levels affect the foraging behavior of field bees. Nurse bees, queens, and winter bees are long-lived and more stress and disease resistant due to their high vitellogenin titers. Successful wintering is dependent upon the last rounds of bees emerging in the late summer/fall having adequate pollen available in the broodnest.”
Continue learning of the beauty and intricacies of the honeybee to more successfully keep your colony(s) healthy, productive, and disease free!
Links: https://scientificbeekeeping.com/