The effect of both beekeeping processes (compressed bees Cb and traditional beekeeping Tb) and food diets (vitamins mixed with pollen grains, pollen grains only and plain sugar syrup) on the colony build up were studied during February – April, 2004, at the apiary belonging to Faculty of Agriculture, Ain Shams University. Feeding colonies with supplementary vitamins plus pollen grains resulted after four brood cycles significantly high daily rates of rearing brood (523 and 434 brood cells for Cb and Tb, respectively) and drawing combs (4.31 and 1.61 combs for Cb and Tb, respectively) compared to either unique pollen grains (432 and 338 brood cells and 3.2 and 1.19 combs for Cb and Tb, respectively) or plain sugar syrup (313 and 219 brood cells and 2.1 and 0.79 combs for Cb and Tb, respectively). On the other hand, the worker’s longevity recorded vice versa which were 21.2  26.2, 23.8 days for colonies fed on vitamins plus pollen grains, pollen grains and sugar syrup, respectively. The colonies which fed on vitamins plus pollen grains, pollen grains and plain sugar syrup, their workers were hoarded 236, 220 and 191 mg of sugar syrup / 3 days, respectively.

Pollen grain morphology and seed coat characters of 11 cultivars belonging to two species of genus Hibiscus (Family Malvaceae) namely H. esculentus (H. Abelmoschus) and H. sabdariffa were investigated. This study was carried out using light microscope (LM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Pollen morphology of this genus is fairly uniform. Generally radially symmetrical apolar, mostly spheroidal, pantoporate. Seed exomorphic characters revealed four types of ornamentations; reticulate, ocealate, foveolate and ruminate. Sodium Dodecyl Sulphate Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) was employed to characterize those taxa. Thirty one bands of seed protein profiles have been constructed from the gel. The produced dendrograms were analyzed by STATISCA program using UPGMA clustering method showed a close affinity among the seven H. esculentus cultivars and the four H. sabdariffa cultivars.