Throughout the summer I use granulated sugar finely ground in a coffee
grinder for dusting bees. Previous to this I used commercially
prepared icing sugar. I stopped this having heard that icing sugar
contained the anti-caking agent E341 - rumours reaching me that this
was harmful to bees, though no scientific evidence was given to back
this up. Whilst it's a bit fiddly using the small coffee grinder, the
granulated sugar is much cheaper than icing sugar. However, I am still
interested to know whether E341 is hazardous to bees - I would have
thought not as icing sugar and various forms of bakers' fondant -
have been used for many years in queen cages, small mating nucs and
for emergency winter feeding.
John Phipps
Greece
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm