Christine Gray wrote:


 > I realize syrup costs less than feeding back honey - but do beekeepers
 > follow the logic right thru?  Feeding their own children sugar water will
 > keep them alive , although thin, pasty and with perpetually dripping
noses
 > as their immune systems will not fully develop. Greed is a bad basis for
 > designing management systems , whether for companies, families or bees.
 > But I will always bow to research over intuitive feelings and anecdotes.

The whole post is a strawman. It implies and either/or situation when
that does not exist in nature.

There is no way, other than lab conditions (or as the example noted,
with your own children), that bees will have a diet that is exclusively
sugar syrup. Even a drought breaks eventually and they will collect
whatever is available. It is profoundly stupid not to feed syrup in a
drought. If you do not you will lose your bees. And pulling supers and
then feeding syrup is economically right and reasonable.

I could argue that feeding bees nothing but pollen and water, a
combination that people can live on, is the healthy way to go, but it is
not. Nor is pure sugar syrup. Nor are all kinds of honey (some will kill
a colony!).

(But feed a child Cheerios for most of their youth and they will survive
quite well. So maybe we should feed our bees Cheerios.)

Christine Gray wrote more:
"It was you yourself , Bob, who recently wondered why beekeepers in the USA
today have such difficulty in keeping their bees alive.  I am trying to
pinpoint possible causes. Generalised comments such as 'poor beekeeping
practices' do not move us forward.  What would u put in the dock?"

I was on the Irish Beekeepers list for quite some time. By in large, the
honey yields in GB were about what I have seen in the US with what
George Imire likes to call BeeHavers (and what I experienced when I
started keeping bees- until I listened to George). So the US has no
exclusive right to poor beekeeping. Bob is absolutely right when he
pinpoints 'poor beekeeping practices' as the problem. To dismiss it out
of hand and want to place something else in the dock, is an attempt to
avoid the issue. (Plus, if I recall, the issue was queens, not
beekeeping in general.)

Beekeepers are fairly much the same no matter where you go. The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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