I did a google search and found this:
Not a joke! Everyone--at least in California--notices the little yellow-gold dots on their cars. People complain they are very hard to get rid of, and wonder what they are. An intrepid Los Angeles Times columnist, Ralph Vartabedian, has done a bit of investigative reporting, and here's what he found.
Almost everybody I know has those yellow spots on their cars, though the wildfires this past week have created a more urgent and more serious problem for car paint.
I had always assumed the yellow spots were some kind of vile condensation of Southern California smog -- a combination of carcinogens from a Carson oil refinery, out-gassing from a plastics factory, a pinch of diesel soot from the port, and the entire concoction held together with a salty Pacific Ocean mist.
I feared those yellow spots were burning holes right through my clear coat and eating into the sheet metal like a titanium drill bit. And yes, they don't easily wash off. I've been tempted to use a Brillo pad, but I never reached that level of desperation.
To solve this mystery I went to a couple of auto body experts, all of whom had seen the yellow spots, but nobody in the paint business could offer an authoritative answer to what or who caused them. Everybody, however, seems to agree that they fall from the sky.
So I went to the superagency that manages our air, the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The scientists at AQMD are on top of this one. They have seen the yellow spots, collected samples, put them under a microscope and have concluded they are bee pollen, said agency spokeswoman Tina Cherry.
I wondered why bees would drop their pollen, when they should be carrying it back to the hive to make honey. AQMD's explanation seemed close but not quite correct. Susan Cobey, a research associate at the UC Davis bee laboratory, said it is not pollen but bee poop -- or more politely, digested pollen.
"The bees mix the pollen with a little bit of honey and put it in a basket on their legs, so it is in there pretty securely and doesn't fall out," Cobey said.
