AD>> >David Eyre and others responded to my description of feeding
  >> >cooked honey back to my bees with warnings of bad results.
  >> >I have not experienced any trouble with this.  Perhaps I've
  >> >just been lucky or the quantities are too small do harm.
 
No it's really not luck, you just have not heated the honey hot enough
or for a long enough time. If you do it right it should kill the hive in
a few hours after they eat it, takes longer if you don't.<G>
 
AD>Yup.  Bees are amazingly resilient, and canwithstand most of the help we
  >give them (am I starting to sound like Andy here?)
 
True on both accounts.
 
I have stayed out of this discussion mainly because in the last two
seasons with the value of honey what it is I can't see anyway anyone
could afford to feed honey to bees. But if they must I can report
that in my own experience during one season when the price of a load of
sugar got higher then the cost of the tanker trucks that haul it I
turned to honey as a sugar substitute to feed my bees and it was no
better then feeding sugar....
 
That spring I purchased 2 containers of honey in nice closed top shinny
red drums from WESTCO or what ever the name of the Western Australia
Honey marketing group is called. (They now have a WEB page if anyone
wants to drop in on them.)
 
I had a choice of honey and took delivery of some very nice light amber
or extra light amber grade of honey, as I was hoping it would have some
pollen in it and really did not care what the color grade was. It was
not eucalyptus honey. The honey was beautiful, every drum was the same,
NO JUNK, and when I need to use the honey I warmed the honey over night
in a hot room with radiant heating in the floor and used air to blow it
out into my 600 gallon mixing and canning tank and drugs were
incorporated into the honey and water could be added if necessary. It was
then pumped into 4 one gallons cans at a time and taken out to the bees
to be put on the hives upside down on the beehive tops which have a hole
the size of the neck of the can. The lid of the can has one or more
holes of the size that will only allow the bees to take the feed down at
the rate of two or three pounds per day for maximum stimulation.
 
I had no problem using the honey in place of sugar syrup, had no new
disease problems, or any signs of any digestive problems in the bees
which we seldom have here in California because of the mild winters
allowing the bees to get out and do it on the wing and not in the hive.
I must admit that sometimes they don't get that far away from the hive
and the costal blue gum flow (eucalyptus) is famous for spotting the
hives, the truck, and sadly the neighbors wash, cars, and freshly
painted houses. More then one beekeeper has paid a price for having his
bees to close to civilization during the blue gum flow.
 
Anyway as I said I had not problem feeding honey in place of sugar, BUT
I was disappointed because I was certain there would be some measurable
benefit or at the least something I could see and there was NONE and
that was with feeding hives as much as 5 gallons of honey in season.
 
I did have a problem with those nice red drums which were lithographed
with the logo of the Australian honey packer when I used them for a
nice crop of Wild Buckwheat two years later and exported it to Europe.
The buyer was sure he had been taken and tried to get a refund saying
that he had found eucalyptus pollen in the honey. At the time I was into
pollen collecting and did a lot of low power looking to identify pollens
and other junk in honey and as when the buyer found out who produced the
honey not another word was ever said. The original Australian honey had
little pollen in it and what little it had was from some kind of mint
and maybe some pollen that looked like pine, but no eucalyptus as I
spend a lot of time looking at samples when it first arrived for the fun
of it. All my Wild Buckwheat honey had good amounts of buckwheat pollen
in it as it this area the buckwheat produces a large amount of very nice
pollen and sometimes the bees will even fill half full frames of
buckwheat pollen with honey, especially if the hives have a few extra
entrances as most of mine do.<G>
                                  ttul, OLd Drone
 
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---
 ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ "Where there is honey, there are beekeepers"