Greetings everyone!

 

I need your thoughts on this one when you get a chance.  I acquired by
donation a substantial amount of food grade corn syrup.  It is highly
refined and used in the baking industry according to the manufacturer.  The
material turned solid on them and it became unmarketable. So they offered it
one of our bee associations and in turn it came to me. 

 

I am able to liquefy it easily and have experimented with it by feeding it
to a handful of colonies.  So far, so good.

 

Coincidently, Bee Culture had an article on sugar and corn syrup.  The
author indicates that fructose is closer to the composition of honey and is
an acceptable source of feed.  The author also discussed regular sugar.  The
article didn't recommend one over the other; rather, the gist of it was that
they are different types of sugar and both are excellent food sources for
bees.

 

Another coincidence is an advertisement by Mann Lake in ABJ where they claim
that sugar syrup is a better brood builder whereas fructose corn syrup is a
better bulk storage builder.  This implies that one approach would be to use
sugar syrup in the spring and corn syrup in the fall.

 

Without any knowledge of the above, I started 10 nucs in July and fed them
initially 400 lbs of sugar syrup.  True to form they built foundation into
comb very rapidly. The nucs have bees occupying 7-10 frames at this point in
time.  I switched over to corn syrup in a heavy mixture (I cut it with
water) and they are indeed putting on bulk stores.

 

Here's my question.  When I mention corn syrup to other beekeepers I get a
bad reaction.  Why does corn syrup have a bad reputation?

 

Best to all,

 

Everett


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