Floral Fidility

If Honey bees exhibit floral fidelity whereby they collect nectar from the same plants be it OSR, Apple, Hawthorn etc.
How do they decide what flowers to collect Pollen from, With nectar the bees indicate the location of nectar by dancing on the comb be it round dance or waggle dance, How do they know where to collect Pollen is it just the foragers visiting random flowers and collecting what is available. I am aware that they collect pollen when visiting OSR, Apple, Hawthorn, and this can be transferred to foraging bees when returning to the hive as not all of it is packed into their pollen baskets. Is there something in transferring this within the hive that indicates its location.

I came across this article on Honey bee nutrition,
"A good publication to review for pollen
contents of many common plants is Fat Bees Skinny Bees – a
manual on honey bee nutrition for beekeepers
(https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/downloads/05-054). The authors of
this manual include a list of pollen compositions from
some common Australian plants." https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN86800.pdf
Do you know if ther is/was any similar work caried out in either Scotland, Ireland, Wales or England.

This subject has been on my mind all weekend so I did a bit of research reading articles by Tom Seeley and Randy Oliver eventually coming across this doc which enlightened me.
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00891826/document
And this one: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-...e-hive-part-2/

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Greengage

... With nectar the bees indicate the location of nectar by dancing on the comb ... How do they know where to collect Pollen is it just the foragers visiting random flowers and collecting what is available. ...

---

I only skim-read the two articles you mentioned in post 3, and think they deal with how a colony indicates what they need in the hive rather than how to get to the source. Your question was, I think, how foraging scouts relay the knowledge of a pollen source to the colony. With nectar, apart from dancing, they also offer some of the nectar to the other bees, and that's not possible with pollen. So, if it was a pollen-only source like willows, how do they do it?

Jürgen Tautz says that bees watching a dancer form a little group, and will leave with a dancer in-the-know. That dancer will then buzz around above the site to indicate it to the followers and release pheremones from their Nasanov glands.

Just now I'm reading through Celia Davis and talking about the footprint pheremones, she says they use it to mark 'unscented food sources' - so, perhaps a combination of dancing, following-my-leader, footprint pheremones, Nasanov and buzzing. Missing from a pollen source message is the taste clue and, perhaps, scent clue.

Kitta

This is an interesting subject, Bees bringing back Pollen usually store it near uncapped brood, so nurse bees have easy access to it, Nurse bees themselves need pollen to produce brood food, Lack of Pollen in the Hive due to inclement weather means hungry bees and starvation of larvae, Therefore they will cannibalise younger larvae and cap older larvae even before they would usually be capped and Drones are forgotten about altogether. Brood also give off pheromones, The influences within the hive of Nurse bees checking Pollen cells and their interaction with returning foragers though throphallactic interactions also influences foragers to search for pollen as they also carry pollen in their honey crop and not all pollen is stored in their Pollen baskets. they would share it between each other as some would be on their thorax or heads. I must read Jurgen Tautz again.