At 08:21 AM 8/24/97 +0000, aweinert wrote:
>> any case corn oils are used to suppress mite populations by many
beekeepers.
 
>I have had a passing interest on this and have read in the Hive and
>the honey bee that  cholesterol can help in brood production .
 
>Does anyone know of ways to  add this to the diet or parries.  ?
 
>The higherst easily obtainable  cocentration of  natural cholesterol
>is in egg yolk from a limited survey  of books. ?
 
>Does anypone  put this in their patties or is it just too expensive?
 
I am sure someone has tried it, but don't recall who, and yes the recovery of
cost is a factor in all ingredients. I personally have tried many far out
things such as dried blood, all kinds of milk fractions, but not egg yolks.
 
>Also the recipe's for   bee food here in Australia include  Soy
>flour.  Is this a waste of resources?
 
"Soy" flower is somewhat of a scared cow when it comes to bee feed nothing
bad I can say about it will go unanswered by it proponents. ("It must be
good as so and so sells diets with it in it") It can be fed dry and the
bees will collect it, as they will also collect sulfur dust, no one would
expect bees to benefit from this. It can be fed in a patties and it will
disappear. Its only real value may be to puff up a diet the same as one
could use many other inert ingredients. If the diet does not contain yeasts
its value is "0" unless one just likes to see his bees busy and materials
being used. Soy protein in bee diets only uses up a lot of soy protein and
the sugar needed to keep it from drying out. Without
other proteins or natural pollen stored or coming into the hive it is of no
value to honeybees.
 
One word of caution. Anyone who plays...pays. Sometimes it is only cleaning
up a mess in his hives, other times with some live yeasts they will start a
colony of their own in the plywood of your truck bed and eat it up in a
season or two.<BG>
The ideal protein diet would be one that could be fed as a liquid and that
was the one that I was/am looking for.(Honeybees consume only liquids.) The
closest I got was a mixture that would turn off a hive from rearing any
brood at all, in fact it also turned off their individual elimination
processes.
 
The facts are the in pollen, which is not what bees eat, one can find a
great number of interesting things including very complex fats and sugars,
some by themselves are toxic to bees, all great for study. I suspect these
things are misinterpreted by many as essential elements in a bees diets and
real work needs to be done on what the bees actually eat which is a mixture
of dissolved proteins
and sugars in solutions of fermented pollen proteins that may have little
resemblance to the pollen it was made from.
 
IMHO
ttul, the OLd Drone