>
> >Food grade powdered eggs are expensive!


You noticed!  We used spray-dried whole egg, but it smelled like rotten
eggs.  Human food grade dried egg yolk is appears to be much better.  I
don't want to feed my bees anything that I wouldn't eat myself (we often get
hungry in the bee yard, and have to munch on patties to survive).


I've also been trying soy protein *isolate* to avoid soy flour toxicity
issues.  Also more expensive, but a little really boosts the protein level.
Use at low levels, bees didn't like too much.

There are fine differences between the various commercial and home made
formulas.  All appear to help the bees to some extent.  Some have good data
from controlled trials, but we could use a lot more trials.  The simplest
test now is whether a beekeeper is bringing strong, healthy colonies to
almonds or not--whatever he did, worked.

Feeding of supplement has really caught on with commercial beekeepers.  The
consensus that I'm hearing is that about a pound a week will maintain
healthy, disease resistant, strong colonies.  And Dee, I don't necessarily
consider this as unnatural stoking of the colonies, but rather a maintenance
of healthy nutrition, just as one would use for any other form of livestock.

Randy Oliver

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