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This is my sixth week in Colombia working on a bee pollen dryer for campesinos, small farmers in Colombia, that live in an hour to two hour circumference of Bogota. I´m stationed in Bogota and working with entrepreneur, agriculturalist, and friend Salomon Saleh. Were working on two models for the dryer: An in-trap design where pollen is dried real time as it’s collected from bees, and a traditional dryer, where pollen is collected periodically from several hives and dried in mass.
The whole point of both designs is to
prevent, slow, or stop bacterial growth as soon as possible. We’re going about
this by removing water from the pollen, but this can also be achieved by
lowering the temperature of the pollen and increasing hygienic handling
processes as well as multiple other methods.
In-Trap Dryer
We´ve been mainly working on this design
the past few weeks as we have the space and tools to work on this project, but
not the other. This design essentially consists of a solar collector that heats
the air, a fan that passes air from the collector to the trap, and a small
solar panel that powers the fan. Our results in this design have been quite
spotty, working phenomenally on sunny days and not working at all on cloudy
days. Because of the inconsistency of weather, many times of day we end up with
a trap that’s slightly elevated in temperature and has little air flow. So
although the dryer works well at some points, at other points it’s essentially
an incubation chamber for bacteria which is bad news for the pollen!
Because of this we’re now brainstorming
designs that keep the pollen trap cooler and easier to clean to slow bacterial
growth.
Bulk Dryer
We’ve started working more on this design
in the past couple weeks but it has yet to be tested. Major success? Incredible
failure? You will have to wait for the coming posts to find out. But what I can
tell you is that this design is made using junked refrigerators, which really
helps to lower the dryer cost (I can’t take credit for this good idea it was all
Salomon!). It’s fans are powered by electricity and the heat is provided by
propane, but I want to integrate a solar collector to reduce our propane
consumption. Everything is controlled by an arduino, which I’ve been learning a
lot about how to use.
We’re putting some finishing touches on
the design and it’s just about ready to go. We’re only waiting on some
measurement equipment so we can see how well it works.
But what about the Campesinos?
No worries we haven’t forgotten about our
clients! We’re having a meeting with a group of beekeeping campesinos the first
week in December to update them on our progress and results and get feedback
about how well our design meets their needs.
Salomon also told me that many campesinos
don’t clean their trap regularly and don’t collect their pollen within the
recommended time to prevent spoilage. So I was thinking about putting together
some educational materials that really make the benefits of regular cleaning
and collection clear. Preventative measures such as cleaning and limiting the
time window for bacterial growth are by far the most effective and cheapest
ways to improve pollen quality. If they can produce pollen with reliably high
quality, their pollen becomes worth a lot more in the local market and has potential
to enter the international market (++$$ for campesinos).
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