A Journey to Preserve Bee Pollen in Colombia by Alex Dunwoody

         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).