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Food Detectives
8
on the Case
Pretend for a moment that you are an archaeol-
ogist excavating artifacts at an Aztec pyramid.
The Aztecs were an indigenous people who
lived in what is now Mexico. Their power-
ful empire had its heyday more than 500
years ago in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The Spanish conquerors of the New World
destroyed the empire in the years 1519 –
1521. Now, suppose you found an ancient
clay pot full of honey during your archeo-
logical dig. What could this honey tell you
about the Aztecs or the times during which
they lived? What secrets could a simple sub-
stance like honey hold? If we performed a mi-
croscopic analysis of the honey, we might uncover
some important and revealing particles inside: pollen
grains.
Pollen Grains — The Business Cards of Blossoms
During their flight from blossom to blossom, honey bees collect nectar from which
they produce the honey. Besides the nectar, however, they also collect pollen
which, when kneaded with the nectar, serves as food for the bee larvae. Have you
ever observed a bee on the hunt for blossoms? They often emerge from a flower
dusted from head to toe with yellow pollen, so it's no wonder that a grain or two
of pollen ends up getting into the honey.
But all pollen grains are not the same. The round, thorny pollen of a sunflower, for
example, looks completely different than the pollen of a pine or a spruce, which
has air sacks. Some examples of how different pollen grains look can be found on
this page and on one of the prepared slides in the kit.
The fact that the pollen grains from different plants have very characteristic
shapes, surface structures, and sizes has led to the existence of pollen grain ex-
perts. With the aid of a microscope, they study the pollen composition of a wide
variety of samples — to determine, among many other things, the country from
which a honey originated. You can imagine that it is no easy task to know the
appearances of all of the pollen normally occurring in honey and comparing them
with honey samples — especially if you consider that it's pollen from plants all
over the world!
Acorn
Acacia
Cuckoo flower
Dandelion
Spruce
Oak
Dead nettle
Sunflower
Chervil
Hazelnut
An Aztec pyramid
Pollen from a sunflower (above) and a pine (below)
Beech
Daisy
Crowfoot
Pine
Common heather
27
Fir
Grass
Apple
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