For the small country of New Zealand, honey is truly a "golden" liquid – it is the basis of a billion-dollar industry. Because of its isolation in a far corner of the Pacific, New Zealand is free of European foul brood, a disease that can devastate beehives. The accidental introduction of foul brood disease into the country would be a blow to New Zealand's "clean, green" image and could destroy the local honey industry.

Bees can not only carry foul brood disease, it can be transmitted on the pollen they harvest. To protect the honey industry, under the Biosecurity Act of 1993, bulk pollen could be imported into New Zealand only under an Import Health Permit, which required testing of the pollen, once it was landed in New Zealand, to ensure it was disease-free. The importation of unprocessed bee pollen into New Zealand has since been banned; bee pollen is allowed in only in tablet or capsule form.

In June 1997 officials from the New Zealand Ministry of Agricultural and Forestry (MAF) learnt that low-grade bee pollen was being sold on the local market. The pollen did not appear to be of local origin, and as no New Zealand company had been given a permit to import bulk pollen, they decided to investigate.

Documents showed that a local company, Megavitamin Laboratories Limited, based in Christchurch, the major city in the South Island of New Zealand, had imported from the United States 200 kilograms of "corn flower, cleaned and sifted" and 50 kilograms of "corn flower powder" on 10 June 1997.

In July 1997 a further shipment of "corn-flower cleaned and sifted", shipped from San Francisco, was found by MAF officials at a freight forwarding company in Christchurch. No Import Health Permit had been issued to allow this product to be imported. As a result of this discovery MAF obtained a warrant to search the premises of Megavitamin Laboratories Limited.

On the premises, MAF officials found empty drums, labeled as "corn flower" and with what appeared to be residues of bee pollen. These drums were identical to the drums found at the freight forwarding company's offices. They also found documents on the premises, including a facsimile from San Francisco thanking Megavitamin Laboratories for their order of bee pollen, and a reply from the managing director of Megavitamin asking them to invoice the consignment as "corn flour".

On the other side of the Pacific, officials of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in San Francisco were investigating the source of the shipments. They found documents indicating that the misleading manifest was at the request of the New Zealand importer, and that another consignment of pollen was to be labeled as "camomile powder".

The defendants in the case were Evan Stewart, the Company Director and Operations Manager, and his father Warren Stewart, the Managing Director of Megavitamin Laboratories. When they were questioned, they said that the pollen had been collected from cornflowers and chemically treated to harden the pollen into granules. They also claimed that it was the suppliers who had suggested that the consignment should be labeled as cornflower, as that was the source of the pollen.

I was asked to check whether all the pollen was cornflower and to try and determine the original source of the pollen.

In July 1997 I was given 16 samples of bee pollen, collected from 16 drums from both the freight forwarder's and Megavitamin's premises. The samples consisted of yellow-brown granules—analysis showed that the granules were almost pure pollen composed of a wide variety of types. There were only minor variations in the samples from the barrels—the pollen from the drums at both premises were identical in composition and had all come from the same source. I did not try to identify all of the pollen, just enough to confirm its source.

The pollen granules had been imported into New Zealand from San Francisco, but the pollen assemblage did not appear to be what I would expect from a northern American source. Therefore I sent some of the pollen slides to Prof. Vaughn Bryant of Texas A & M University and Dr Gretchen Jones of the USDA for their advice.

The pollen that we identified consisted of the following taxa (because of the similarity of pollen from each barrel the list is a composite from all samples):

Acanthaceae		Lamiaceae
Justicia		Leguminosae
Alangium type		Liliaceae
Alternanthera		Linum
Amaranthaceae		Malvaceae
Apiaceae		cf. Abutilon
Asteraceae		Moraceae
Artemisia		Cannabis sativa
Centaurea		Myriophyllum
cf. Saussurea		Onagraceae
Bignoniaceae		Epilobium
?Dolichandrone		?Pachysandra
Brassicaceae		Plantago formosana
Campanulaceae		Poaceae
Adenophora		Zea mays
Caryophyllaceae		Polygalaceae
Chenopodiaceae		Polygonaceae
Convolvulaceae		Fagopyrum esculentum
Argyreia nervosa		Rosaceae
Cucurbitaceae		Rumex
Cucurbita		Sesamum orientale (?S. indicum)
Echium		Solanaceae
Euphorbiaceae		Taraxacum
Fabaceae		Thymus
?Gentianaceae		Trifolium
Geraniaceae		Verbenaceae
Labiatae		cf. Clerodendron

There was cornflower in the samples, but it formed a very small and insignificant component. Overall the barrels contained pollen predominantly from Asteraceae (Artemisia), Poaceae and Fagopyrum. Chenopodiaceae, Sesamum, Zea mays, Labiatae, and Cannabis sativa pollen were more common in some samples than in others. To the surprise of both officials and the importer, cannabis pollen was common in most of the samples, although the pollen does not contain the active hallucinogenic drug.

If the pollen had come from Canada or the United States the samples would have contained Ericaceae (if from Alaska), Elaeagnus, Acacia, Mimosa, Fagaceae (oak), Rhamnaceae (Berchemia), Onagraceae (Gaura, Oenothera), Pinaceae, Tiliaceae and Ulmaceae. However, none of these taxa were located. The most important omission was that of oak—the tree is widespread and it is a favourite source of pollen for bees in the United States. A number of the pollen types were clues to the source of the pollen. Fagopyrum esculentum, a species of buckwheat with polymorphic pollen, was abundant in many of the samples. This species of buckwheat is grown in eastern Canada and the United States in cool, moist areas on the Canadian/US border, but only where the growing season is long enough, as it is frost-tender. However, there were a number of pollen taxa missing from this sample that would be typical of the Canadian/US border regions. For example, Canadian honey nearly always contains pollen from clover, yet only one of the drum samples contained any clover pollen. Honey from the United States and Canada rarely contains buckwheat pollen. This buckwheat is much more common in China and is native to Asia. Honey from China commonly contains abundant buckwheat pollen. In addition, the genus Adenophora is common in China and Japan. The species Sesamum orientale (or S. indicum) is also common in China and Japan, although it is known from some localities in the United States.

The samples lacked distinctive marker pollen that would define a precise locality—most of the pollen comes from plants that can be found in many temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Overall, however, there was a lack of a large number of taxa that are a major component of Canadian and United States bee pollen. All the taxa identified do occur in China and this points to a very strong likelihood that the samples examined originally come from China and not the United States, even though the bee pollen was exported to New Zealand from San Francisco.

Also, a composite source for the bee pollen cannot be discounted. The pollen may represents a number of sources, possibly including both China and the United States, but again the lack of pollen commonly found in honey and bee pollen within the United States and Canada tends to rule this out. On the evidence obtained, a sole Chinese source is more likely.

For the Stewarts to be convicted, the ultimate source of the bee pollen was not an issue, so I did not carry out a detailed pollen analysis and identification. I only needed to show that the bee pollen could not have come from a local New Zealand source, and the evidence for this was conclusive.

In a desperate bid to save their company from insolvency, the Stewarts had tried to bypass stringent biosecurity checks and had claimed that 500 kilograms of Chinese bee pollen was cornflour or cornflower. In April 1999 they pleaded guilty and were jailed for jeopardising New Zealand's $3 billion bee industry.

I wish to thank Prof. Vaughn Bryant (Texas A & M University), Dr Gretchen Jones (US Department of Agriculture) and Mr Gary Redshaw (Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Investigation Unit) for information used in this short note.

Contact: Dallas C. Mildenhall, Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, P.O. Box 30 368, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, E-mail: D.Mildenhall@gns.cri.nz
 

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  This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 22(2):17-19, 1999.