To Gerald Herrin and Fellow Beekeepers,
You asked: if a newly hived
>package of bees will ignore sugar water when, for example, white clover
>is blooming.

Gerald, feed your new package to get them up and going.  Four to six weeks
after installing a package of bees, the colony drops in population.  I
wondered if mine were having a disease problem.  But the drop in population
is from the lag time in brood production.  It may take a week or more for
the queen to start laying, then forty days for the new brood to become
foragers.  Feeding the new colony takes a lot of stress off them.  They
will still forage, and need to forage for pollen.  But feed them syrup
anyway.  George Imirie writes in his Pink Pages to feed the new colony
until next fall.  Make sure that the bees are fed until they draw two deep
boxes of comb (or 3 mediums) and have them filled with stores and brood.

I have found times when my bees ignore the syrup, or take it slowly.  I
have to make sure the holes in the feeder are not plugged with sugar
crystals or propolis.  I found that my colonies take syrup slower than
others on this list.  They may prefer to forage.  But feed them anyway.

Cheers,
Kyle