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Why feed sugar syrup to honey bees?

Spring is one of the times when you may have to feed your bees sugar syrup. If you are new to beekeeping it helps to understand why, when, what, and how to feed. I will try to cover the main points.

If your bees have used up their winter stores of honey, they may need syrup for a few weeks until the nectar starts to flow. This can happen even if you didn’t harvest any honey in the previous season. Sometimes a dry summer prevents the bees from making enough honey, sometimes a winter cluster is a bit too large and eats through the supplies early, and sometimes the nectar flows are late. And, yes, sometimes the beekeeper harvested too much the year before. In any case, a few weeks of sugar syrup can often save the colony.

Another springtime need for syrup occurs when you set up a new hive with a package of bees. They don’t have anything to start with unless you give them frames of honey or sugar syrup. If you’re just starting out, and you don’t have frames of honey laying around, sugar syrup will do the trick. Never give your bees honey that didn’t come from your own apiary. Honey can harbor disease organisms that can infect your new bees. Stick with sugar syrup.

Check your existing hives in the very early spring to see if they have enough honey. If they don’t, you can start them on syrup if it’s warm enough for them to break cluster and feed on it. Otherwise, you might want to use a candy board until the weather gets warmer.

A spring syrup is usually mixed in a 1:1 ratio, either by weight or volume—they are close enough that it doesn’t much matter. Every type of nectar has a different ratio of sugar to water, so the bees can handle a little variation. Don’t obsess over it. Just heat the water to about a simmer, remove it from the stove and dump in the sugar, then stir until all the crystals are dissolved. You can also dissolve the sugar in cold water, it just takes more stirring.

At this point you can add some Honey-B-Healthy if you like, or a couple of drops of an essential oil, such as spearmint or lemongrass. These oils are supposed to be good for the bees and, in any case, the bees love them and will finish the syrup in no time. Honey-B-Healthy is a commercial product that contains these essential oils along with an emulsifier to keep them in solution. It’s an excellent product, but expensive, so some beekeepers like to make a substitute. Either is fine, but the Honey-B-Healthy is easier to handle.

I will write about the different kinds of feeders in a separate post. In the meantime, you can stock up on sugar. You will be pleased to know that the price of sugar reached all-time highs this past year thanks to the sugar tariffs imposed by our government.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

We must take care of our pollinators

News reports insistently tell us that bees pollinate one-third of the world’s food supply. But what does that really mean?

First of all, that estimate varies with the researcher, but it usually includes all animal-pollinated crops, not just those pollinated by bees. These animal pollinators include many types of insects as well as birds and bats. Nevertheless, some folks estimate that bees are responsible for about 75% of all animal pollination. But again, the numbers vary.

Secondly, the “one-third” estimate usually includes that portion of the meat supply that was fed animal-pollinated crops, such as alfalfa and clover. This is another number that is hard to calculate because, in modern agriculture, more and more animals are fed grains instead of leafy forage.

The two-thirds of the food supply not pollinated by animals is dominated by the grains. Most grains are in the grass family and are normally pollinated by the wind. They include wheat, corn, millet, rice, rye, barley, oats, spelt, sorghum, and lesser known crops such as teff and triticale. Quinoa and amaranth are two non-grass grains that also require no animal pollinators. The two-thirds portion also includes crops that could be pollinated by animals, but are not, such as potatoes. (Nearly all potatoes are propagated by seed pieces, which are not seeds at all but chunks of potato that sprout when planted.) Lastly, the two-thirds includes fish, and that amount of meat which is raised on grain or other crops not pollinated by animals.

So why are animal-pollinated plants so important? The grains and meat can supply all the calories, protein, and fat we could possibly use, but the flowering plants provide the vast array of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, flavonoids, antioxidants, and trace elements that we need for good health. We could not survive in a world devoid of the animal-pollinated plants, so caring for pollinators is not a choice but a necessity.

Rusty

Bee on squash. Flickr photo by cygnus921
Bee on squash. Flickr photo by cygnus921

More on painting bee hives

When I first wrote about painting bee hives, I filed it under “infrequently asked questions,” but it has turned out to be one of my most popular posts. Because of that, I decided to add several details that I didn’t mention before.

New beekeepers want to know if they should paint the ends (or edges)—the part of the hive that is stacked on another part. The first time I painted hives I did not paint that part, I just painted the outside surfaces. However, after painting them a dark green and stacking them in the field, I noticed a rim of unpainted wood where each piece of equipment met (or didn’t quite meet) the next. I suppose it depends how picky you are, but this made me crazy. I have painted those surfaces ever since.

The downsides of this practice are many. First of all it’s a lot of extra work. Secondly, latex paint loves to stick to itself, especially if you happen to strap the hive together with a ratcheting tie-down. Combined with the propolis the bees stick in there, these become extremely difficult to separate. And once you ding the edges with the hive tool, you’ve knocked the paint off again.

So, if you’re not picky consider yourself lucky and don’t bother painting them. If you don’t like the unpainted ring, try just painting over the edge about one-quarter inch. If your boxes are pretty square, a quarter-inch should do it. It’s hard to line all the boxes up perfectly, however, so don’t expect your perfectly-squared boxes to eliminate the problem by itself.

Another frequent question concerns the type of paint. I use low-VOC latex paint because it’s better for the environment than oil-based paints. I’ve tried to get it without added fungicide, but I’ve been told that virtually all paint sold today comes with factory-supplied fungicide. So just make sure you don’t paint inside the hive, and make sure the paint is dry before installing bees.

A third issue is priming. I started out by priming and gave up on it. I find that the primer shows through once the wood becomes scratched, chipped, or weathered which (see above) irritates me. If you don’t prime, the knots eventually bleed through, but for some reason this does not bother me. Like I say, these aesthetic decisions are important for the beekeeper—not the bees—so do what makes you happy.

One last thing: keep some paint on hand. As a beekeeper, you are never done painting. There is always a new piece of equipment,  a repair, or just general maintenance that includes paint. Whenever I take a piece of woodenware to the shop for mending, cleaning, or modifying I make a habit of re-painting it as well.

Rusty

University of Connecticut Apiary. New York Times photo. 2008.
University of Connecticut Apiary. New York Times photo. 2008.

Have you had your pesticide today?

When I was first introduced to the study of insecticides in agriculture there was a clear delineation between the systemic kind and the contact kind. Most pesticides work by poisoning the target organism when it touches or ingests the poison—that much is pretty much the same in either case. But the big difference is that a contact poison remains on the surface of the plant, and the systemic kind is absorbed by the plant and moves through the vascular system to all its parts, including leaves, roots, stems, flowers, and even the pollen.

The clear delineation went like this: contact insecticides could be used on food crops but systemic ones could not. It was simple and obviously correct because the contact insecticides could be washed off, but the systemic ones could not. You wouldn’t poison something you were going to eat. Right?

Systemic pesticides worked well and they were used for ornamental (non-food) crops. They could be used on garden flowers, bushes, Christmas trees, and lawns. Lots of plants are grown that are not eaten, so there was a market for these chemicals.

What I don’t understand is what happened next. I don’t even know when it happened, although I sort of suspect it was a late 80s kind of phenomenon. The thing that happened is this: gradually (or suddenly?) the EPA decided it was okay to poison the human food supply with toxic systemic chemicals that are absorbed right into the food. Huh? Don’t these people eat? Don’t they have kids who eat? Who’s getting paid off? Why do we let our government get away with this?

The honey bees are just the canaries in the mine shaft. They are dying, the native pollinators are dying, and we can see it happen. But the same corn plant that produced the toxic pollen that sickened the honey bee is on your dinner table. Corn is the perfect example because it is in practically everything we eat, including soda pop (high-fructose corn syrup), corn oil, corn meal, grits, corn flakes, and corn starch. It’s probably in your bourbon and is commonly fed to beef, pork, poultry, and even farmed fish.

And corn isn’t the only crop treated with systemics; there are many. In fact, recent research has shown that virtually every human being on earth is harboring an assortment of pesticides in his or her body. Man-eating carnivores beware: too many humans may be bad for your health.

Remember that dying bees are not just a beekeeper problem. If the bees disappear can humanity be far behind?

Rusty