Couple guys saying high… WW x Blue and a big Hawaiian Cat. What’s your approach to collecting and storing pollen?
respect,
pal
One thing i will add to what has already been said is that you have to be very careful of humidity levels of the space you are working in.
when it comes to collecting and storing pollen, you need to try to keep the humidity below 50%. 40-35% is the ideal.
When you have high humidity, when collecting the pollen by letting cut branches sit in a cup of water and let the pollen drop
in my experience it makes collection harder because the pollen will clump up with the moisture instead of in the dry flour consistency.
it will render a good amount of that pollen collected useless because once the individual grains of pollen touch moister they deteriorate and not be viable.
same thing goes for storage. Make sure the pollen is very dry before putting in a storage container. If moist the exact same thing can happen but worse.
Let's say the container is very narrow and doesn't have a lot of surface area in it, if a couple moist grains are in the container it will spread and render all the pollen useless.
A wider container with more surface area helps with this, if a couple moist grains sneak in they don't spread throughout the whole container and can be recognized and rectified by removing faster.
another way to help with this is use a desiccant in your storage container. a few pieces of rice, a pack from a bottle of medication you got from the store take your pick
these are just a few lessons i have learned the hard way, and trying to pass on the knowledge so people can avoid my mistakes
one such mistake was trying to collect from a surface when humidity levels were really high
a good portion clumped together and was rendered useless, and the pollen i believed to be "still good" and put in a storage contains had moisture creep through and ruin all of it
humidity level are your worst enemy when it comes to collection.