The migratory trucked hives is a "special case" in terms of the number of US
beekeepers, but is the most common case in terms of numbers of US hives.
I've heard the numbers of 1,000 commercial beekeepers of significant size vs
100,000 - 150,000 beekeepers of every other size.

When one is moving hives around, one has the problem of "overweight" trucks.
Honey has to be pulled before the hives are moved, or one is overweight at
the first scale one encounters.  Even leaving a fall crop on the hives when
moving them is a potential problem.  One moves the bees to their winter
grounds, and THEN feeds, like it or not.

Beekeepers have been sold one pollen supplement after another, each
soy-protein huckster making grander claims that the prior one about being of
significant "nutritional value" to the bees, rattling off long lists of
amino acids and other impressive-sounding things.  If these claims are not
true, and the resulting diet fed to the bees is still nutritionally
deficient, beekeepers have little recourse but to hope that more R&D will
move the ball further down the field and closer to the goal of a "complete
solution" to the bee nutrition problem.  If complexity is any guide, we
certainly have come a long way from the pollen supplements of the 1990s.

But telling us that pure HFCS and pure cane (or beet) sugar is unequal to
the nutrition offered by honey is a useless bit of obvious information, as
it ignores the fact that any traces of this or that in honey or nectar would
be swamped out by the impact of the pollen.  Looking for more than
carbohydrates in the nectar is a fool's errand.  It should be obvious that
the obvious-to-the-casual-observer difference between healthy bees and
malnourished bees is determined by the "pollen" far more than by the
"nectar".

It is aggravating in that the wrong question was asked in this study, and
answered to 4 decimal places of precision.  Clearly, some pollens are far
better nutrition for bees than others, and some nectars are better sources
of sugars than others.  Corn pollen is famous for being "low quality"
pollen, and I can state from personal experience that apples provide such
lousy nectar and pollen that colonies pollinating apples can easily lose
serious weight while in orchards, requiring the astute beekeeper to feed
hives on apples, or risk having them starve by the third orchard into which
they are placed.

The question to answer is "Do HFCS and/or sugar PLUS the modern high-tech
pollen supplements, plus a minimal amount of fresh-frozen pollen equal or
exceed what the bees would encounter?" on forage types such as "The
Almonds", "Midwest Clover and Wildflowers", "Truck Garden Crops", and so on.


The ideal mix of flower types likely does not exist outside of some "restore
the meadows" project or a botanical garden.  Bees will always be subjected
to too much of one thing, and not enough of the other.   If there is an
ideal mix of forage in one place, I've never heard anyone define what it
would be.

We may need to constantly supplement the diet of our bees when they are
pollinating, this makes sense, as we cannot expect a monoculture to provide
a well-rounded diet.
But how to supplement properly for which crop?

In short, my doctor can send a blood sample into a lab, read the results,
and tell me what vitamins I need to take in what doses, so why can't we do
that for bees?

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