"Let's take pollen sub and sugar syrup as
 examples.  It's the equivalent of feeding your kids
 junk food."

Studies have shown that bees winter as well or better on stores made from grocery store sucrose versus honey.  That hardly implies sucrose is a junk food.   In fact, there likely is nothing at all in honey produced from nectar that makes it more healthy for bees than plain white table sugar.  After all, honey contains next to nothing other than sugars and water.  It contains tiny amounts of essential oils that are toxins.  Those essential oils are the main odor components that makes honey such an attractive food for humans even thou they are toxins.  Some honeys contain traces of alkaloids that are really toxic to humans such that such honeys can make people sick.  Chemicals like nicotine and far worse than nicotine.  And even tinier amounts  of proteins, that are largely there to mildly acidify the stores and also invert sucrose to glucose, that were added by the bees themselves and equally added to sucrose when it is stored.  Trace amounts of a few vitamins in concentrations too low to impact health.  Is it worth pointing out that the main sugar in most nectars is plain old table sugar and bees must process it just the same as they process table sugar to turn it into stores?

While pollen subs are not ideal foods fully equal to natural pollen they are far better than protein starvation.  And far better than dust gleanings from bird feeders or the feeders in my pigeon lofts that bees attack with vigor in early spring before pollen is available

Neither table sugar nor pollen subs are even remotely like junk foods for kids.

Dick

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