At 06:08 PM 2/9/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I am surprised that nobody has yet mentioned that you can sell a pound of
>honey and buy about 6 pounds of sugar with the proceeds.  I wonder if people
>would be so keen on feeding sugar if this was not the case.
 
Several years ago now the price of sugar exceeded the price of honey and I
actually purchased two containers of honey from Australia to feed bees
with. It was OK as we were set up to handle it with air to blow it out of
the closed top drums and tanks to mix in added water and chemicals.
 
As far as being better in any way to feeding HF or HFC it was NOT, but it
was cheaper. It did nothing magic for the bees that I could observe as I
hoped it would.
 
>One reason why sugar feeding might have become necessary is the practice of
>taking strains of bees that have evolved for a short winter like Italy and
>asking them to over winter in a place  with a much longer and colder winter as
>found in much of the US and Canada.  Such bees might do better without the gut
>filling solids found in honey.
 
Italian bees breed here in California for years have been selected for
their honey production in the north and not wintering. They have been
described as sugar bees because they do exceptionally well in the spring
when fed and can develop from a 1- 1/2 pound package in the north early in
the spring to hives that in the past have been the most predictive in the
world. Today not many are shipped north as in the past but these hives of
Italian bees still are productive here and used all over the US to replace
loss and make increase.
 
Chow, the OLd Drone
 
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