A comparison of honey bee-collected pollen from working agricultural lands using light microscopy and ITS metabarcoding datasets

Here we compare pollen identification results derived from light microscopy and DNA sequencing techniques of a robust number of samples collected from honey bee colonies embedded within intensive agricultural landscapes in the Northern Great Plains. We collected pollen samples from colonies within 6 apiaries in 2010 and 2011. For each pollen sample, we identified pollen grains via light microscopy and provide the number of grain counts-per-million. A separate aliquot of each pollen sample subjected to light microscope identification was also used for DNA sequencing analysis. We provide the plant operational taxonomic unit (OTU) for all base pair reads as the number of reads-per-million.