a Seth Charbonneau snip followed by > my comment... 

Have no fear about my safety, I have been misappropriating kitchen utensils for decades, she knew what she was getting.
Tho she almost drew the line at putting nucs in the basement...almost

> it is good to see there are other folks who's significant other are enablers of this mental malady all of us share.  

> as to the topic first I have made up my own patties from 'locally' acquired spent brewers yeast and on occasions from expeller soy flour which I buy at the local Kroger's grocery.  Typically I add one of these with captured pollen a good deal of sugar and just a wee bit of canola oil.  I press a 'dollop' (ice cream scoop) of this between two pieces of newspaper using a wood tortilla press.  I typically make this up in small enough portions to get the bees to consume/move it fairly quickly.

>I would be dubious about feeding corn meal or potatoes (yes the magazine of old speaks to folks feeding baked potatoes... and how weird is that?) and if I could obtain (reasonable priced) dried egg yolk I would likely add this to any mix I made.  

>as far as cost and returns... first there is a difference between putting this in a hive to stimulate the hive to turn a profit vs doing the same thing as an insurance (risk minimization) strategy.  Same goes for syrup.. and the big boys seem to think that feeding pollen type patties without also feeding syrup is a waste of time and money. Here I would not add pollen like stuff as a profit generation strategy since we typically have a great diversity of pollen which can come into the hive almost 12 months of the year... as such there ain't much bang for the buck in feeding pollen patties.  On the other hand in 2011 we reached the zenith of a slowly evolving drought and I did feed a good deal of pollen patties just to insure some of my hives survival.  I cannot not say the strategy had anything to do with encouraging a honey crop or fulfilling a pollination contract but it did allow a significant number of my existing hive to live into that fall when the drought finally broke.

Gene in Central Texas...   

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html