Essay On Pollen

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INTRODUCTION
1.1 Bee-Pollen
Pollen is the male gametophyte of the flowering plants and has together with the ovule, the capacity to give rise to viable seeds. Pollen exists for a time as an independent unit and thus contains most nutrients, essential for life. Man has long been the consumer of pollen and pollen containing food though rarely he experienced discomfort on contact with pollen. In many living organisms like insects, pollen is essential for their life cycle, being rich particularly in protein (Wakhle, 1981). Once bee pollen was defined in legislation as food, the nutritional value of this product became important. It contents high concentration of reducing sugars, essential amino acids, fatty acids, minerals and abundant in proteins and vitamins (Campos, 2010). Enzyme activity of pollen in honeybee (Apis cerena Fab.) reported to find the source of enzyme in Indian honey (Wakhle, Phadke and Nair, 1983).
Honeybees collect pollen to fulfil their nutritional requirement, because pollen provides bees with proteins, minerals, lipids, vitamins and many other nutrients. Pollen is also most important for honeybees to produce the royal-jelly which is rich in most of the essential nutrients. Royal-jelly nourishes larval queen, Queen-bee and young worker larvae. Pollen is an ultimate source of the protein which is used directly by older workers and young larvae of the both sexes. Thus pollen is essential for normal growth and development of individual as well as reproduction of colonies.

Plate 1.1: Honey bee (Apis mellifera) having pollen load in pollen basket on their hind legs
1.2 Nutritional value of bee-pollen
The carbohydrates in pollen are mainly polysaccharides like starch and cell wall material. The sugar fructose, gluc...

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...1983).

1.7 Aims and objectives:
The aim of this work was to establish the main conditions for obtaining a novel natural food product from pollen, safe and with improved nutritional potential, to be used as a dietary supplement or a functional ingredient for formulating other foods. Pollen matrices are subjected to lactic acid fermentation using lactic acid bacteria as a starters and their effect on some of the original characteristics were studied.

The main objectives of this work are:
1. To collect bee pollen and bee bread from honey bee colony.
2. To separate whey from curd to use as a starter culture for bee-pollen fermentation and to prepare pure starter culture for bee-pollen fermentation.
3. To perform Solid state fermentation of bee-pollen by Lactic acid bacteria from whey.
4. To estimate and compare nutritive value of fermented, non-fermented pollen.

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