bee pollen as soil additive

The following chart may only apply to pollen gathered by bees from certain flowers but it is a good list of stuff you might want for your plants. My concern is that when something says it has ten percent of the daily recommended allowance, sometimes that is far too much for a plant. For instance, the potassium in an Emergen-C pack is something like twenty percent of the daily recommended intake for a human but is far more that what most plants can take in a day.

Does anyone here have any experience with bee pollen?

Nutrition Value Protein 2% Carbohydrate 1% Dietary fiber 2 % Vitamin C 4 % Iron 2 % Zinc 2 % Copper 4 % Magnesium 1 %

 

The statistics shown are for one teaspoon of bee pollen.

 

I'm sold!

 

I am considering my next watering be blackstrap and bee pollen with a touch of indonesian guano..

 

That was my first grow and now I am here onto my second grow and am doing it again. Unfortunately, last time I ended up with one plant and it yielded about two ounces of decent bud under 320W of CFL.

Now, I have tents. The 3x3 tents have 400W of HPS going in them right now and the 4x4 ones have 600W. There are two of the latter and one of the former.

In the 3x3 (Silver Edition) I have two Afghani #1's from Sensi Seeds. In one of the 4x4's, there are two White Widow's I got as clones and one Hindu Kush, also obtained in clone form. Finally, in the last 4x4, I have one rather tall pheno from the Afghani #1 seeds referred to and a White Widow plus one Sour Diesel.

The 3x3 is the first in a line of tents whose lights are connected by a compact ducting arrangement that necessitates I harvest all at once due to the difficulty in filtering light out of neighboring tents.

All of my plants are two weeks and a day into flower and all are showing small buds, some seem to be moving considerably slower than they could but all the plants look healthy and I am happy for that.

I use Foxfarm's Happy Frog three to one with earthworm castings and that I then dilute with perlite. I use Superthrive occasionally but not as a matter of course. Often, I keep it to transplant time only or, sometimes, with young seedlings. Additionally, every feeding I give my plants includes General Hydroponics' Floralicious Plus Concentrated Organic Enhancer which has most of what Superthrive has minus the hormones. It includes carbs as well and it looks and smells, as usual, to be derived from molasses.

For my nute program, I have been using the International House of Guano, a program from Sunleaves that goes from Mexican (high in N) bat guano to Peruvian seabird guano (equal N and P) to Jamaican bat guano (higher in P but lower in N) to Indonesian bat guano (higher still in P and very low in N). The Afghans are the only ones raised from seed and also the only ones that spent their vegging weeks under metal halide.

The pics are from four days ago, when they were eleven days into flowering. I have since done a great deal of trimming of the lower growth to direct energy to the more substantial branches.

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Really? Do you think I am on target for 400g per square meter? The 4x4's have a little under 40W per square foot while the 3x3's are getting about 45.

 

At any rate, I revamped this thread specifically for the use of bee pollen as cited above. I don't exactly have a control group to get perfectly scientific about it but since we know that all this good stuff is already in bee pollen the real question becomes what is too little, what is too much, and what is just right.

Since I don't see any mention of using bee pollen in cannabis cultivation anywhere else, I will post my results. I intend to use a little soon (gonna try a teaspoon in five gallons at two and a half weeks into flower) and a little as part of my last feeding, as I get ready to flush. For the Afghani #1's that only puts the feedings about three weeks apart while with the Sour Diesel, that puts bee pollen use about seven weeks apart.

That ought to give enough variation in its application to get some idea of its usefulness.

I will be mixing them with my guano teas.

 

Well,this grow will not experience MUCH bee pollen but the first dose does not seem to have bothered anything. During my first grow, I DID have some problems and I don't know if I used too much or not but I plan to, with each successive grow, use more until I find out what too much really is.

Eventually, then, I will have something definitive to share. I can tell you right now that dressing the top of the soil with a teaspoon didn't HURT any of my plants. I might give them two more, one in a couple of weeks and one at the end of my use of nutes, just prior to flush. So far, White Widows, Afghan #1's, Master Kush, and Hindu Kush are all fine with this small dose.

If I find out that these plants can take a whole lot more, I will switch to mixing it in with my guano teas.

 

Just an update - will administer another teaspoon on top of my soil, per plant. This in another two weeks. That should be three weeks after the first dose. I figure until I find that issues are developing that I will do this every 3 weeks until flush. It takes a little while for it to totally spread out through the soil, perhaps two to four waterings.

This could be a drop in the bucket of what it can use but I am most interested in what it gives to the microbes in my organic soil who, in turn, have been getting some nice aminos and carbs for some time (Floralicious Plus). The actual nutes in this exist in relatively small amounts but there are so many different benefits that perhaps this food goes straight to work on what might be missing in a given plant. At least I know now that I am getting steady and small amounts of calcium and magnesium.

Here are a couple of pics from three days ago.

 

Everything seems to be coming along wonderfully. The temps are a little lower than I would like (mainly at night) but I ought to get a little purple out of those Afghans and the White Widows are doing fantastic! I would like to get my humidity down a bit and am working on it. It hovers at around sixty percent - sometimes higher!

Anyway, the only drawback so far I see regarding my use of bee pollen as a soil additive is that where it sits atop the soil in any small clumps, it gathers mold. Of course, if my RH was as low as it should be then that might not be the case.

I think I will start mixing it into my guano teas. Here is an update, these pics being taken on day 38 of 12/12.

 

Anyone care to guess a yield? The first shot is of the Afghan that you can see at the back of the tent. Its two main stalks have grown so tall they are going to finish above the lights. I tied them back because they get kind of hot since I have to schedule them to go off for a few minutes every now and then so the heat will actually get up around 75 during the day.

The second two shots are of the White Widow which you can see again in the last shot - lower left. It's actually on a milk crate. On the lower right is a much smaller Hindu Kush but all are on the same day of 12/12.

 

Well, i have been giving the plants a teaspoon or so on top of the soil every couple of weeks and so far so good but I have inadvertently subjected many of my plants to heat stress and I am afraid this will taint the experiment

I will keep readers updated anyway as I intend to experiment with bee pollen for the foreseeable future.