How long is cannabis pollen viable in the wild?

If pollen falls from the plant onto a rock or other inert thing and just sits there, and is not molested by rain or by other. how long is its lifespan before it can't pollinate any longer?
Thank you.

I think the idea of plants being fertilised from miles away is nonsense. Must happen every now and then in evolutionary terms but ... in my experience often you have to put a male right beside a female to get seeds.

If the pollen sat unmolested by anything, including wind and otherwise perfect temperature, pressure, etc, i would say weeks or months. Most likely, the pollen would be rendered useless by morning dew, high daytime temperatures, humidity and sunlight within days. Wind dispersal would probably be a very big factor as well. Depending on the quantity of pollen, even a mild windspeed would spread the pollen to meaningless amounts within hours. Of course, if the pollen production was ongoing, then you’d have a bigger problem. Just my opinion.

I don't have a specific problem, I am trying to learn how to deal with the stuff, and planning. I was curious as to how old it gets before it drops dead from old age.

I owe this info to ICMag member Aridbud who is a Breeder. She tells me pollen will keep in the freezer for a LONG time. That it needs to be properly dry and can be mixed with flour so that you have some bulk. (Yes, you could shake flour AND pollen mix over your chosen female and the flour would not hurt.)

So when I 've pollinated a plant it is as easy as collecting pollen in a long paper bag and carefully putting it over a flowering branch you want to pollinate and then shaking or tapping the bag.

Good luck!

Treevly said:

I don't have a specific problem, I am trying to learn how to deal with the stuff, and planning. I was curious as to how old it gets before it drops dead from old age.

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I suspect a week at most in the outdoors. A big factor would be humidity in the area.
Dew, rain, fog,etc would destroy it. Sunlight probably kills it too. But males will release
new pollen every day for weeks until they die or are removed.

My googlefu sucks but I finally found something about tomato pollen lasting 3 days in open air and still fruiting. Anything after the third day it didn't fruit.
https://tgc.ifas.ufl.edu/vol1/v1p11.html
It was found that pollen stored in a open vial in the full midsummer sun can still set a fruits on the third afternoon after the morning of collection. No fruit was set later by this pollen.

Teddybrae said:

I think the idea of plants being fertilised from miles away is nonsense.

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You obviously have not seen a yellow cloud of pollen from a hemp field before. I assure you, pollen from a large enough field can travel for miles on a moderate wind.

Pollen lasts nearly indefinitely as long as it stays dry. Once it gets wet it germinates and loses the ability to create a seed. Pollen, when completely dried, can be kept in a freezer for decades.

Douglas.Curtis said:

You obviously have not seen a yellow cloud of pollen from a hemp field before. I assure you, pollen from a large enough field can travel for miles on a moderate wind.

Pollen lasts nearly indefinitely as long as it stays dry. Once it gets wet it germinates and loses the ability to create a seed. Pollen, when completely dried, can be kept in a freezer for decades.

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I know of one county in which growers in the southern half of the county are unable to grow - outdoors or even indoors, if doors are open - without their females becoming seriously pollinated and seeded. There is a 1,000 acre (+ or -) hemp farm in the south-west part of the county. Winds tend to be westerly. I have observed this close up. Growers 5 and 7 miles away are out of luck. I am about 18 miles further east and seem not affected.

Ran across a very informative article on the subject once by a person who was breeding exotic corn.
Was amazed at how involved it can get to do so.

I think the idea of plants being fertilised from miles away is nonsense.

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You're right at the levels we're used to in the western world, where most males are culled. A big hemp field might knock up all the girls within a mile or two. You're also right as far as the competition between males. In a place like Morocco that produces a vast amount of pollen it's who's pollen reaches who first. I'm guessing the local farms have enough males they keep the area saturated to the point males from further away don't have much of a chance of finding a receptive female that hasn't already been hit.

However when you have thousands of males that go all at once, in places like Lebanon, Morocco, and India, you don't want to be downwind. Somebody else already pointed this out but if you're in southern Spain within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean, you're going to have seeds. I forget what the exact distance is but it's a long ways. Just collecting my own pollen can give me the sniffles I'm guessing allergy season in Morocco is August.

I've let my own males go off, 4 or 5 of them, less then 100 yards from my patch. It resulted in maybe 50 seeds per pound. I always get tempted to let one super male loose in the patch just to see what happens. I never do it because I've got enough sense to know better. 100 yards is plenty of distance if your males are small and there's trees and bushes between your patch and the males. Just don't shake them, carefully drop them into your paper bag.

Forgot there's a question here. It depends on the humidity. If there's morning dew not very long. No dew and it'll last as long as in a paper bag, at least a couple weeks.

i have 5 regular males about 75 yards from my females. One large, 4 medium size.

usually i just have one large male and a very light dusting of seeds, since the male is in an area protected from wind.

one ? about pollen - how much of the molecules that make up pollen is water ? how much water needs to be removed to make it, not pollen ?

if a pollen grain is made not viable by being dried out, if the humidity increases, can its viability be restored ?

No. That's right Dougie. I did see the Sputnik when I was a kid but I haven't seen a Hemp Field. There are very few in whole of the country where I live. In fact I doubt many people have seen a Hemp Field.
Mr Treevly was not talking about being near a Hemp Field.
Mr Treevly was not talking about Central Europe where Ruderalis grows wild.
Geez, Dougie! I wish I was as smart and well informed as you are. My life would have been a blessing if so, I 'm sure.

Douglas.Curtis said:

You obviously have not seen a yellow cloud of pollen from a hemp field before. I assure you, pollen from a large enough field can travel for miles on a moderate wind.

Pollen lasts nearly indefinitely as long as it stays dry. Once it gets wet it germinates and loses the ability to create a seed. Pollen, when completely dried, can be kept in a freezer for decades.

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I wonder what growers do in places like the Bekkar Valley in Lebanon? It's a relatively small area, densely farmed.
The area is famous for its Hash to Europe and I wonder if the Hash is from both Male AND Female plants?

I know too that in Gujarat state in India they have an annual festival where men run thru the ripe fields and whatever sticks to them is scraped off and made into sweets. In that place they call the product Bhang.

If pollination is as you say it may be that there is a lot of pollen and flower bits in the hashish.

therevverend said:

You're right at the levels we're used to in the western world, where most males are culled. A big hemp field might knock up all the girls within a mile or two. You're also right as far as the competition between males. In a place like Morocco that produces a vast amount of pollen it's who's pollen reaches who first. I'm guessing the local farms have enough males they keep the area saturated to the point males from further away don't have much of a chance of finding a receptive female that hasn't already been hit.

However when you have thousands of males that go all at once, in places like Lebanon, Morocco, and India, you don't want to be downwind. Somebody else already pointed this out but if you're in southern Spain within a hundred miles of the Mediterranean, you're going to have seeds. I forget what the exact distance is but it's a long ways. Just collecting my own pollen can give me the sniffles I'm guessing allergy season in Morocco is August.

I've let my own males go off, 4 or 5 of them, less then 100 yards from my patch. It resulted in maybe 50 seeds per pound. I always get tempted to let one super male loose in the patch just to see what happens. I never do it because I've got enough sense to know better. 100 yards is plenty of distance if your males are small and there's trees and bushes between your patch and the males. Just don't shake them, carefully drop them into your paper bag.

Forgot there's a question here. It depends on the humidity. If there's morning dew not very long. No dew and it'll last as long as in a paper bag, at least a couple weeks.

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Teddybrae said:

I wonder what growers do in places like the Bekkar Valley in Lebanon? It's a relatively small area, densely farmed.
The area is famous for its Hash to Europe and I wonder if the Hash is from both Male AND Female plants?

I know too that in Gujarat state in India they have an annual festival where men run thru the ripe fields and whatever sticks to them is scraped off and made into sweets. In that place they call the product Bhang.

If pollination is as you say it may be that there is a lot of pollen and flower bits in the hashish.

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hash is the trichromes of female plants, seeds do make a difference, they add a step in processing. Its not impossible though, and probably a given (the norm) in areas where pollen is prevelent.



I have, as well, seen hemp pollen travel 5-7 miles, in eastern colorado, and really mess up a well managed outdoor grow.

I wonder what growers do in places like the Bekkar Valley in Lebanon? It's a relatively small area, densely farmed.
The area is famous for its Hash to Europe and I wonder if the Hash is from both Male AND Female plants?

I know too that in Gujarat state in India they have an annual festival where men run thru the ripe fields and whatever sticks to them is scraped off and made into sweets. In that place they call the product Bhang.

If pollination is as you say it may be that there is a lot of pollen and flower bits in the hashish.

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You bring up a good point. I've heard about low grade hashish containing quite a bit of pollen. Not to be confused with fine hashish in Morocco which is sometimes called 'pollen'. When I sift resin, and in the old days in Afghanistan, a small screen is used to remove the dust, pollen, and other contaminates. They (and I) prefer 45-50 microns which means any pollen would be screened out. (cannabis pollen is 25-30 microns)

In Morocco and I assume Lebanon and other places, in the old days, (and probably today) the worst farmers with the worst hashish would screen the males and the females. To get whatever resin was in the males since the females barely had more resin. Their traditional landrace hashplants didn't produce a lot, the resin glands are much smaller then what we're used to, and they didn't use much irrigation or put much effort into growing fine cannabis. Since the commercial market was producing such a huge demand quality suffered. They'd let the plants die when they were immature. Dry in the fields, get covered with dust and pollen, since you get a greater volume of powder with all the contaminates and broken down too dry plant matter.

That's the stuff they'd export. Males always flower before the females mature, at least 3-4 weeks and often longer or much longer. Seeds need 3-8 weeks to fully ripen. The best farmers would let the good stuff fully mature long after the males died and released their pollen. This would be the case with most strains, in India for instance, where the females don't mature until November or December. Even if the males flowered in late October the pollen would be long gone by harvest. In places like Morocco and Lebanon the plants flower much faster and earlier. Even so you when you see males in pictures of Bekaa Valley hashish fields if the females are fully mature they're often fully dried and desiccated. You can also find pictures with healthy males dropping loads of pollen onto nearly ripe females.

A personal observation when I've grown early finishing strains, especially Middle Eastern ones like Sinai, Lebanese, and Moroccan, is that the males Auto flowered. It's never made sense to me. Now maybe it does. If most of the males flower before the females develop resin there's less pollen in the hashish. It's not a very good theory but it could be possible. It's more likely that my northern photoperiod messed them up.

therevverend said:

You bring up a good point. I've heard about low grade hashish containing quite a bit of pollen. Not to be confused with fine hashish in Morocco which is sometimes called 'pollen'. When I sift resin, and in the old days in Afghanistan, a small screen is used to remove the dust, pollen, and other contaminates. They (and I) prefer 45-50 microns which means any pollen would be screened out. (cannabis pollen is 25-30 microns)

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I wrote elsewhere here recently that woman I knew used to travel the European Golf Circuit which included North Africa. They would go to villages to pick up the hash which she says was harvested by beating the bushes against leather aprons then scraping off the resin.
Quite a different process to the one you describe.
(I musta smoked some of that Hash. In those days it was out of this world!)

Nice story. What you describe is a way to make small amounts of good hashish from fresh plants. No doubt they still dried and screened the plants. I'm guessing the technique came from Lebanon, the first hash makers in Morocco learned the tricks of the trade from Lebanese hashish growers. It wasn't until the 1960s that hashish was produced in Morocco.

Using leather aprons to collect resin from live plants goes back a long time in the Himalayas. Likely from before plants were dried and sifted. There's different legends that have grown from it, the Kazakh one about the naked man on a horse riding through hash fields and the Nepalese stories of people shaving their body hair and running through the fields. The stories evolved from true accounts. In 1855 a Prussian named von Bibra recorded:

As the seeds were forming, the farmers would move through the fields,during the heat of the day wearing leather aprons. They would take up the flowers in hand, and crush and press them into the apron to smear as much resin onto the garment as could be possible.

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Another account from the same year is provided by the Englishman Johnston (I'm guessing William Johnston, a surveyor who was in India at this time but I'll have to check it out):

In Central India, men covered with leather aprons run backwards and forwards through the hemp-fields, beating the plants violently. By this means the resin is detached and adheres to the leather. This is scraped off, and is the ordinary churrus of Kabul. It does not bring so high a price as Momeea. (hand rubbed) In other places the leather aprons are dispensed with, and the resin is collected on the naked skins of the coolies.

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The Indian Textile Journal from 1893 states:

The charas is a peculiar resinous exudate from the plant only found in hot climates... The men who are employed to collect it are stripped bare of clothing, and their bodies are well smeared with oil; next they are ordered to run about among the plants, the resin sticks to their oiled bodies; when they return, the resin is separated from their bodies and stored.

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and from Victor Robinson:

During the hot season, according to Dr. O'Shaughnessy, men clothed in leather run violently through the hemp fieleds and brush forcibly against the plants. The soft sticky resin adheres to the garments, and is later scraped off and kneaded into balls. Dr. M'Kinnon informed Dr. O'Shaughnessy that in the province of Nepal they dispense with the leather attire and the natives run naked through the hemp fields, gathering the resin on their bare bodies.

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It seems likely to me the naked part is bullshit, getting a full bikini wax job from cannabis resin would be a bad experience and I don't think pube bong hits would taste good. Or burning coolie ass hair. I suppose anything is possible.

These stories are all from the Indian Subcontinent where there's a long tradition of hand rubbing, and from areas that didn't sieve resin until very recently. It's possible your story got Morocco confused with Nepal. I haven't heard of collection from fresh plants in North Africa and all the Muslim countries practice sieving as opposed to hand rubbing. I'm not dismissing the story, it's different then the Indian stories and there's no reason the Moroccans couldn't make hashish that way. Especially if it was before the sieved hash was ready. It could also be a bullshit story they told the foreigners, hash dealers do stuff like that.(at least they weren't beating the plants while naked) Flailing the plants does sound Moroccan or Lebanese.

I've been watching a documentary about Hashish growers in Morocco, I've seen parts of it before but this time I"m watching it from start to finish. I'm not sure what year it was made but they're growing the original kif landrace so probably from before the 2000s. It's great stuff, the cannabis farmers in Morocco are awesome, pot growers are birds of a feather. If you're interested in Moroccan hashmaking it's a treat to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXskL1jLQiM

(Found it. Came out in 2002. https://www.fandor.com/films/hashish

I have questions

I have questions

Douglas.Curtis said:

Once it gets wet it germinates and loses the ability to create a seed.

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I’m under the impression that only SEEDS germinate - and that you need the pollen *before* you can have seeds.

Clearly I misunderstand, could you help me out?

therevverend said:

When I sift resin, and in the old days in Afghanistan, a small screen is used to remove the dust, pollen, and other contaminates. They (and I) prefer 45-50 microns which means any pollen would be screened out. (cannabis pollen is 25-30 microns)

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Pretty sure you mean the pollen falls thru the 45/50 micron screen, yes?

BearCreekFarms said:

hash is the trichromes of female plants, seeds do make a difference, they add a step in processing.

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Have heard more than once that male plants *do* develop trichomes. Are you saying resin from a male plant goes unused (due to, say, males being trashed on sight so often, or something?