Feeding sugar in any form is fine as long as the honey bees are not actively collecting nectar and making honey. If you feed syrup while the bees are making honey, the honey will be become diluted with the syrup. Honey is made from the nectar of flowers.
The most common way to help a hungry colony is by feeding bees sugar water. While sugar water or sugar syrup is not exactly the same as plant nectar, it will keep a colony alive.
Some beekeepers prefer a ratio of 1 part of sugar to 1 part of water — measured by weight (known as 1:1). The 1:1 syrup is generally used to: supplement honey stores. stimulate colonies to rear brood.
In fact, the wrong type of sugar can cause bees to develop dysentery and start making tainted honey or bee pollen. For beekeepers trying to collect and distribute bulk honey for sale, this can mean significant financial losses as well.
Do not give bumblebees honey as this can contain pathogens (which is why honeybee keepers never feed shop-bought honey to their bees).
Interestingly, all species of bees that make honey also eat it. They use it as an energy source, and it is packed with the nutrients they need to remain healthy.
Thankfully, bees work very hard and often make more honey than they need, which allows beekeepers to harvest the excess. On average, a beekeeper can expect to yield about 50 pounds (4.2 gallons) of honey each year from a healthy colony in a fertile area.
Feeding can be stopped as soon as nectar is consistently available in the environment - dandelions are one of the first big nectar producers, but other flowers provide nectar too. Be aware of what is blooming in your area. Remember that you should stop feeding well before placing any supers on the hive.
Other sugars from natural nectar can exhibit strong toxicity, including the monosaccharides mannose (10), xylose, arabinose, and rhamnose, as well as some oligosaccharides; these can reduce the life span of adult bees at concentrations as low as 2% (11).
“Do not feed them honey, jam, sugary drinks or brown, icing or caster sugar.
If you want to help the bees with drying and capping, make sure you have both a lower hive opening and an upper one. This allows a circular airflow where drier, cooler air comes in the bottom, and warmer, wetter air leaves through the top.
Honey substitutes
Compared to sugar water, it is much less work for bees to process thicker solutions like ambrosia® bee feed syrup because the inversion takes much less glandular effort. Alternatively, beekeepers also prepare a fondant using powdered sugar and honey, but this is very labor-intensive and expensive.
Bees use nectar for energy and to help feed their colonies. Taste neurons on the proboscis, or the mouthparts, are activated when bees come into contact with food.
Raw sugar. Raw sugar is minimally or unrefined white sugar, which has a small amount of molasses to give it the golden color. Raw sugar is unlikely to have enough molasses to negatively impact bees and is safe to feed.
Honey bees will not drink syrup that is too cold. Once the temperature of the syrup drops to a certain point—somewhere in the low 50s°F—the bees would become chilled if they were to drink it. Imagine how you would feel downing an icy beverage when you are nearly immobile with cold. Not a pleasant thought.
Feeding too much sugar water before a nectar flow can also produce too many worker bees. This makes it harder to collect sufficient resources during the nectar flow to support the increased number of bees. This scenario may result in the workers raising a new queen and the colony splitting.
A one-to-one mixture of sugar and water — measured either by weight or by volume — provides the energy your bees need to stimulate brood rearing and start drawing out foundation. For each gallon of sugar syrup, measure out 10 2/3 cups sugar and 10 2/3 cups of water.
Bees don't differentiate between food sources and they will cap sugar water instead of nectar. Bees cannot make honey with a sugar water mix.
Feeding a 1:1 sugar water ratio in deep internal feeders during the summer months means that the hive can focus on building comb which is essential to all of the other aspects of a healthy hive.
Two species of honeybees (Apidae, genus Apis) are known to be crepuscular and to forage throughout the night if a moon half-full or larger is present in the sky — the giant Asian honeybee Apis dorsata and the African honeybee Apis mellifera adansonii.
Uncapped honey is unripe honey with a moisture content too high to be capped. The bees will cap the honey when moisture drops below 18%. This reduces the potential for honey to ferment in the honeycomb. Uncapped honey is edible and can be harvested but may ferment.
When a hive becomes overfull, the queen doesn't have enough room to continue to lay eggs and produce brood, and a swarm is more likely to occur. Beekeepers should be aware of the signs that a hive is about to overflow, so they can take the correct actions to prevent it from becoming honey bound.
If you're new to keeping bees, you might wonder: do bees get mad when you take their honey? Harvesting honey does not anger or hurt the bees unless you are greedy and take too much. When done properly, bees are undisturbed when honey is harvested. Responsible beekeepers always leave enough honey for the hive.
If you take too much honey, that can be the tipping point between life and death for your hive even if they are doing really well initially. Broaden your perspective to take in a long-term view. It's always better to extract less honey if it means keeping your bees alive for the next year.