REGARDING           RE>bees ignoring sugar syrup
 
Tim Peters writes:
> This year, for the first time, my girls were dis-interested in the sugar
syrup
>that I feed as soon as the temps go above 40 deg. At first I offered syrup
>left over from last fall...it was slightly fermented..but I heated it to
>175 deg and it seemed to regain some of the original sweet smell.  This
syrup
>was turned down flat...I had it on for a week and none of the 4 hives took
>any measurable amounts. Reasoning that the fermentation was the cause, I
dumped
>all 5 gallons and mixed a fresh 2:1 batch. While small amounts were taken,
for
>the most part it to has gone ignored. What gives??
 
>I also feed pollen substitute, since the trees don't leaf until late APR up
here
>(NE VT). The girls were equally unimpressed with this. There were two or
three
>days where they did take up the pollen sub quickly.
 
>Although this spring has been just as terrible here as elsewhere the amount
>of precip and the cool temps seemed to have provoked the trees to yield
>tremendous amounts of pollen and nectar (?). All four surviving hives had
>some honey left from the winter. Could it be that the combination of
leftover
>honey and high natural pollen and nectar has made feeding unnecessary?
 
Your answer, it seems to me, lies in your last statements.  If the hive has
stored honey, they wouldn't be interested in syrup.  I started a lot of
package bees this spring, giving them brood chambers from hives dead of
varroa, but with at least 3-4 frames of honey each.  Even though I also
supplied a gallon of syrup, it was barely touched by most of the package
colonies.  This was somewhat frustrating, since the main reason I fed was to
get some Fumidil into their systems.
 
Ted Fischer