Feeding

[wheresthedog]

Hi all,

Are there good reasons that feeding bees back their harvested honey instead of sugar based feeds is a bad idea? Could honey be prepared to replace all the sugar feed types (fondant, candy, syrup etc).

[Jon]

Sugar is ten times cheaper and seems to be just as good, maybe even better over winter as it has fewer solids.
Bees get their proteins from pollen not honey.

[wheresthedog]

Cheers Jon. We're having a big environmental overhaul and rethink over here and we've just gotten round to sugar.

For what it's worth - EU sugar is all beet sugar, expensive in terms of environment and generally grown via big multinationals like British Sugar in league with Monsanto. However, it does travel short distances, support British farmers and usually is in paper-like packaging. Organic, Fairtrade and cane sugar tend to be imported, packed in plastic and rarely ticks all boxes on ethics. However, it does support poorer farmers in the developing world, especially if Fairtrade, and ship transport is not necessarily worse environmentally than road transport and big industrial manufacture within Britain or Europe.

Sooooo we wondered if we can do without altogether and just feed our bees back their honey. They made it after all :) I'm more interested in the nutritional side of things. Good point regards solids content. (http://www.honey.com/images/uploads/general/conversion_chart.pdf).

[The Drone Ranger]

Just leaving the honey on the bees seems easier
A double broodbox of 11 frames in each rearrange to keep the stores above the cluster

At this time of year swarming due to lack of space etc is the main concern
There might not be any bees left to feed if they all swarm

If you haven't already have a look at this site for enviro;mental beekeping
http://www.biobees.com/

[Neils]

Economics aside I believe that bees do better on honey than syrup, some will disagree on that point. Now, when it should be times of plenty I tend to take frames of honey out of brood boxes and put them in the freezer, they can then be used as needed to top up hives low on stores later in the year.

Nothing to do with my extractor not taking 14x12 frames I'm sure.