Pollen Essay

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REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Honeybees collect nectar and pollen from flowers as food source. The nutrients needed to grow colony populations and maintain their health comes from nectar and pollen. Nectar which is then converted in to honey, provides carbohydrates. Pollen as bee-bread supplies dietary requirements such as proteins, lipids, vitamins and minerals (Huang 2010; Degrandi-Hoffman 2013). A review by Wakhle (1981) reported the versatile characters of pollen and bees products. The royal-jelly produced by honeybees for queen raring, for which pollen is most important, which is rich in most essential nutrients.
Pollen is the male reproductive cell of the flowering plants. It is fine to coarse powder containing the micro-gametophytes of seed plants, which produces the male gametes (sperm cells). It contains high concentration of reducing sugars, essential amino acids, unsaturated/saturated fatty acids, minerals Zn, Cu, Fe and high K/Na ratio and significant quantities of the several vitamins. The amount of these nutritional relevant components is largely dependent on the biological source of the pollen (Campos & Bogdanov, 2010)
2.1 Bee-Pollen or Pollen collected by honeybees:
A hundreds or sometimes millions of pollen grains per flower are collected by honeybees and packed into pollen pellets on their hind legs with the help of special combs and hairs (Krell 1996). While forager bees forages on the flower for nectar, the pollen particles get dusted on them. Pollen is brushed of the worker’s body by their front and middle legs and transferred to a special structure in the hind legs called the cubicula or pollen basket. Forager bees unload their pollen by kicking the pollen pellets off their legs into the cell. These pollens are refe...

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...di & Mardan, 2011).
Generally, lactic acid bacteria (LAB) can be defined as Gram positive, non-spore forming, catalase negative, devoid of cytochromes, acid tolerant, and facultative anaerobe group that produce lactic acid as the major end-product during fermentation of carbohydrates. According to carbohydrate metabolism, they can be divided into two main groups:
1. Homofermentative LAB (produce mainly lactic acid).
2. Heterofermentative LAB (produce lactic acid, carbon dioxide, ethanol and/or acetic acid).
This classification is originated from metabolic routes that organisms used and resulting end product. While homofermentives use glycolysis (Embden- Meyerhof Pathway), heterofermentives use the 6-phosphogluconate/phosphoketolase Pathway (Bulut 2003) (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Glucose utilization metabolic pathway of LAB (Bulut, 2003)

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