These authors assert that artificial bee diets are not harmful to bees, provided they are correctly designed to meet the bees' requirements. Ultimately, though, they conclude an adequate natural diet is better. But in the absence of adequate natural sources, supplemental feeding is crucial to colony survival, especially winter survival.


Exceptionally long non-foraging periods
and insufficient or untimely feeding of
carbohydrates after harvesting honey make
starvation one of the most common reasons
for honey bee colony winter mortality
(Brodschneider et al., 2010; vanEngelsdorp
et al., 2010). However, this is a common
and well-known fact in colony management
and it is the responsibility of beekeepers to
avoid.

Surveys
conducted among Austrian beekeepers
(Brodschneider et al., 2010) also suggest that
the type of carbohydrates fed to colonies (sucrose,
invert sugar or starch syrup) did not affect
overwintering mortality of colonies when
supplementation was done between July and
October.

Starvation influences the behavioural development
of honey bees: food shortage induces
early onset of foraging in young workers,
which affects the life span of the foraging population
and colony demography (Schulz et al.,
1998). Parasites, which also exert nutritional
stress on honey bees, can intensify the effect of
starvation. Alternately, in starving colonies nutritional
stress caused by parasites is amplified.

To our knowledge there are no reports that diets
prepared meeting the criteria presented in this
review harm the bees, although the inferiority
of bees or colonies fed exclusively on artificial
diets compared to those fed natural pollen has
been demonstrated.

Nutrition and health in honey bees
Robert Brodschneider, Karl Crailsheim
Apidologie 41 (2010) 278–294
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