Exploring the Botanical Origins of Bee-Collected Pollen: A Comprehensive Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Bee-collected pollen is one of the most important bee products. In order to predict its chemical composition and nutritional value botanical origin of pollen plays a crucial role. This review intended to collect all available data published about botanical origin of pollen collected all around the world. Due to enourmous amount of data and variables nonlinear principal component analysis (NLPCA), by applying Categorical Principal Component Analysis (CATPCA), was conducted in order to try to determine any specifity and/or differences among samples. Also, importance of some plant families/genera/species for bees was monitored. Based on CATPCA results families can serve in order to distinct samples from North/South America. Also, some samples from Europe (Turkey and Serbia) were characterized with presence of some specific families. Genera were excellent tool to distinguish samples from different parts of Brazil as well as Australia, Asia and Africa. Due to high and specific biodiversity pollen samples obtained from Sonoran desert (USA) completely were separated during analysis. This review presents the first attempt to summarize and classify a large number of data about botanical sources of bee-collected pollen.