Thousands of years ago, honey was already called the food of the gods by the ancient Egyptians. But honey is not just honey. It owes its broad spectrum of color, taste, aroma and ingredients to the nectar collected by bees from various flowering plants and honeydew. In order to determine which plants the bees have visited for their honey or which nectar or honeydew they have collected, honey pollen analysis is an indispensable tool.

The honey pollen analysis is the third pillar, besides the sensory and the chemical-physical examination, to determine the geographical origin and varietal purity of a honey. Here the circumstance is used that each plant visited by a bee leaves its fingerprint in the honey in the form of a pollen typical for each plant species. Based on the number or composition of individual pollen, the geographical origin and varietal purity of the honey is inferred.

It is also used to help the beekeeper decide whether to declare the honey as varietal honey, because the honey jar must always contain the type of honey indicated on the label. A false declaration can lead to severe penalties by the food authorities.

How does the pollen get into the nectar or honey?

• Primary dusting: This is the pollen that is introduced into the honey by the bee in the course of nectar collection.
• Secondary pollen: Pollen that falls from the bee into the honeycomb cell through the hair coat or pollen pouches during honey processing.
• Tertiary dusting: pollen grains that enter the honey during centrifugation or, in the case of pressed honey, through bee bread.

By secondary, as well as tertiary dusting no conclusions can be drawn on the Trachtangebot.

The size of a pollen grain ranges from about 5 µm (5 thousandths of a millimeter) to 150 µm (Fig.1). There are about 5000 pollen grains in one gram of honey. However, not every plant leaves the same amount of pollen in the nectar. This depends on the inflorescence of the plant.

If the flower is upright, the pollen falls down into the nectar at the bottom of the flower when touched or blown by the wind and is thus picked up by the bee when collecting nectar (Fig. 2). If it hangs downwards (Fig. 3), most of the pollen falls onto the edge of the flower or out of the flower. This leaves little pollen in the nectar, which is brought into the hive by the bees. One speaks of over- or under-represented plants. This circumstance is taken into account when judging for botanical origin. (Bandion and Pechhacker, 2003 Method book for honey testing in Austria, ISBN 3-200-00072-4).

Basically, there are three different pollen donors:

• Nectar plants: plants that produce nectar and pollen (rape, sunflower, dandelion, etc.).
• Nectarless plants: plants that produce pollen only (plantain, corn, sour grasses, etc.)
• Wind-blooming plants: plants whose pollen is tolerated by the wind and thus gets into the nectar or honeydew (spruce, alder, birch, etc.)

Flower honey from the site Asparagus Field Road (harvest 2022): We performed a full analysis of the honey, so we identified and listed all pollen forms and then counted 1,000 pollen grains. We judged the honey to be "floral honey": no pollen form is present in such abundance that the honey may be designated as varietal honey. Although 49.5% of the pollen grains found were from canola, canola honey must have a minimum of 60% canola pollen.

We found 39 different pollen forms in our honey sample. The variety of pollen found makes the honey typical of the northeastern outskirts of Vienna: the bees collected both in the surrounding gardens and parks and in the fields of the Marchfeld. Therefore, pollen from fruit trees and lilac from the gardens, from lime trees and black locust from the parks as well as rapeseed from the fields and many herbs from field and path margins can be found. According to our pollen expert Waltraud Auer, another pollen also makes the honey special: "I find pollen from the goddess tree mainly in eastern Austrian honeys, which makes the honey very typical for Vienna." But pollen from soy or trumpet tree is also rarely found in Austrian honeys - so our honey is a bit of a rarity.

The three most common pollen forms are from rapeseed, goddess tree and strawberry or cinquefoil (their pollen is indistinguishable in appearance):

Rape: scientific name: Brassica sp.; frequency in the present honey: 49.5%, size: about 30µm. Round pollen with a highly structured net-like surface, germination points are formed as folds

Tree of gods: scientific name: Ailanthus altissima; frequency in the present honey: 5.6 %, size: about 30µm. Round pollen with a furrowed surface - like a strongly spread net structure, germination points are formed as pore folds

Strawberry or cinquefoil: scientific name: Fragaria sp., Potentilla sp.; frequency in the present honey: 5.4 %, size: up to 25µm. Triangular pollen with slightly furrowed surface (technical term: striato-reticulat), germination sites are formed as pore folds.