This is one of those local things that you neither would have heard about nor believed until you see it. For a couple weeks in the spring in North Carolina, the pine trees dump a huge amount of pollen. I’m not talking about a little bit of pollen that a bee would gather, I’m talking about coat-the-world, make-the-atmosphere-dusty, clog-your-nose kind of pollen. The interior of my car is coated with a yellow dust. Every flat surface in the house has yellow dust. I have pollen tire tracks in my garage. When it rains, it looks like yellow paint was dumped in the gutters. It really is unbelievable.
For a quick photographic description, here is a picture of the stairs going into my office building. That yellow stuff is pollen. It’s kind of clear where people have been walking. The rest is not dust, not dirt. That is pollen. It comes from the long leaf pine. The prolific pollen is probably what permits this pine to grow like weeds around here. The good news is that it lasts a couple weeks and a good couple rains washes it away. But the really good news is that this pine pollen is too large to be absorbed into the bloodstream, so it doesn’t effect people.