| Summary: | Composition of pollen pellets foraged by honeybees, sampled in Degernäs and Tavelsjö, Västerbotten County, during early summer 2020, is used to explore if honeybees are monofloral or polyfloral. Samples from different days and different colours were evaluated by light microscopy. Each unique pollen species in each pellet was morphologically identified with help of an international pollen database (PalDat) and a common bee plant document, using light microscopy and scanning electron microscope photographs. A selection of pollen species were identified down to species level and were used to explore which wild pollinators can also pollinate these plant species, to speculate around possible competition scenarios between them and honeybees. SEM and DNA extraction were performed with a selection of the pollen pellets and with the extracted DNA, different PCR primers targeting different plant gene markers were tested to see which ones worked with pollen from northern Sweden. More detailed pictures of the pollen grains were seen in SEM which helped ease the species identification of some of them. The results showed that only a few of the pollen pellets had only one detected plant species while the rest had 2 or more plant species in them. Thus, these data indicate that the honeybees in Degernäs and Tavelsjö are polyfloral, at least for the samples studied in this bachelor thesis. Methods are evaluated and the findings were that a combination of morphological and molecular biology studies are both needed to be able to establish a new updated pollen database for northern Sweden.
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