How hot & how long. At 04:58 AM 10/25/96 GMT, you wrote: >AD>> >David Eyre and others responded to my description of feeding > >> >cooked honey back to my bees with warnings of bad results. > >> >I have not experienced any trouble with this. Perhaps I've > >> >just been lucky or the quantities are too small do harm. > >No it's really not luck, you just have not heated the honey hot enough >or for a long enough time. If you do it right it should kill the hive in >a few hours after they eat it, takes longer if you don't.<G> > >AD>Yup. Bees are amazingly resilient, and canwithstand most of the help we > >give them (am I starting to sound like Andy here?) > >True on both accounts. > >I have stayed out of this discussion mainly because in the last two >seasons with the value of honey what it is I can't see anyway anyone >could afford to feed honey to bees. But if they must I can report >that in my own experience during one season when the price of a load of >sugar got higher then the cost of the tanker trucks that haul it I >turned to honey as a sugar substitute to feed my bees and it was no >better then feeding sugar.... > >That spring I purchased 2 containers of honey in nice closed top shinny >red drums from WESTCO or what ever the name of the Western Australia >Honey marketing group is called. (They now have a WEB page if anyone >wants to drop in on them.) > >I had a choice of honey and took delivery of some very nice light amber >or extra light amber grade of honey, as I was hoping it would have some >pollen in it and really did not care what the color grade was. It was >not eucalyptus honey. The honey was beautiful, every drum was the same, >NO JUNK, and when I need to use the honey I warmed the honey over night >in a hot room with radiant heating in the floor and used air to blow it >out into my 600 gallon mixing and canning tank and drugs were >incorporated into the honey and water could be added if necessary. It was >then pumped into 4 one gallons cans at a time and taken out to the bees >to be put on the hives upside down on the beehive tops which have a hole >the size of the neck of the can. The lid of the can has one or more >holes of the size that will only allow the bees to take the feed down at >the rate of two or three pounds per day for maximum stimulation. > >I had no problem using the honey in place of sugar syrup, had no new >disease problems, or any signs of any digestive problems in the bees >which we seldom have here in California because of the mild winters >allowing the bees to get out and do it on the wing and not in the hive. >I must admit that sometimes they don't get that far away from the hive >and the costal blue gum flow (eucalyptus) is famous for spotting the >hives, the truck, and sadly the neighbors wash, cars, and freshly >painted houses. More then one beekeeper has paid a price for having his >bees to close to civilization during the blue gum flow. > >Anyway as I said I had not problem feeding honey in place of sugar, BUT >I was disappointed because I was certain there would be some measurable >benefit or at the least something I could see and there was NONE and >that was with feeding hives as much as 5 gallons of honey in season. > >I did have a problem with those nice red drums which were lithographed >with the logo of the Australian honey packer when I used them for a >nice crop of Wild Buckwheat two years later and exported it to Europe. >The buyer was sure he had been taken and tried to get a refund saying >that he had found eucalyptus pollen in the honey. At the time I was into >pollen collecting and did a lot of low power looking to identify pollens >and other junk in honey and as when the buyer found out who produced the >honey not another word was ever said. The original Australian honey had >little pollen in it and what little it had was from some kind of mint >and maybe some pollen that looked like pine, but no eucalyptus as I >spend a lot of time looking at samples when it first arrived for the fun >of it. All my Wild Buckwheat honey had good amounts of buckwheat pollen >in it as it this area the buckwheat produces a large amount of very nice >pollen and sometimes the bees will even fill half full frames of >buckwheat pollen with honey, especially if the hives have a few extra >entrances as most of mine do.<G> > ttul, OLd Drone > >(c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document >in electronic form, or to print for personal use. >(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk. >--- > ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ "Where there is honey, there are beekeepers" > > Steven Albritton LDS Communications, Sports America, Chavin Honey Farms Monroe, Louisiana