Hi All:
 
A few weeks back I picked up on a post from Allen Dick that mentioned that
brewer's yeast was available at his local feed mill, but he didn't know the
quality.  When I checked at my local mill I was able to get a 25 kg. (55
pound) bag for $50.  It was not "feed grade", it was "food grade" from a
company in Mississauga Ontario called Champlain Industries.  It looked,
smelled and tasted exactly like (and might have been exactly the same) as
the stuff in the health food store for four times the price.  Another local
beekeeper got "debittered" stuff which was in flake form so one might be
well advised to look in the bag before taking it.
 
Any good ideas on mixing the dry ingredients with the sugar syrup when
making patties?  I mix the soy flour and brewers yeast in a barrel.  I
dissolve the milk powder into the sugar syrup in a wheel barrow using a
paint mixer on a drill then add the dry powder and stir periodically with a
shovel over the next 12 to 24 hours trying to break up all the little lumps
and get the gluey mass uniform.  Last year I burnt out a mixer trying to
"beat" it smooth.  If it is not smooth I notice that the bees will not eat
the dry lumps.  I have thought that maybe one could adapt a gear pump so
that the gears were churning away in the mass but the case was partly open.
 
When the stuff is runny the mixing is far easier.  Should I be mixing it
runny first and then adding some more powder after to stiffen it? (I am
using 2:1 sugar syrup and putting about 1 pound of dry ingredients to 1
American quart of syrup according to a recipe in the Hive and Honeybee).
 
Regards, Stan
 
I wrote the above post last night, but didn't send it because my internet
server was busy and I was tired.  This morning I had an idea, and put all
the lumpy mix through our big meat grinder (a 2 h.p. job).  It did an
excellent job using the smallest hamburger plate.  Everything came out
completely smooth.  We even used the sausage spout for filling wax paper
sandwich bags.  That was an idea I got from Mark Spagnolo, and although it
worked well with the sausage spout it would have been near impossible to
fill them with a spoon, and I would have gone back to slapping a big dollop
on a sheet of wax paper and folding it up.
 
Since pollen is the vegetarian bees equivalent to their relatives, the
wasps' "meat", I guess the meat grinder was an appropriate tool.