"Do any BEE-L-Digest readers have an opinion of BetterBee's statement that
"Both the vinegar and the citric acid powder help invert the sugar to make
it more digestible for the bees." ?"

I have made sugar blocks by mixing a quart of vinegar to 25 pounds of sugar.  Dried the mix in half filled plastic shoe boxes in my hot box at about 95 deg F for a week or so.   It is not at all obvious that this caused any significant amount of inversion at all compared to blocks made from water and sugar in the same ratio.  When fully dried there is little to no acetic acid odor left in the blocks.  When I read the stuff about inverting sugars during cooking the usual formulas include much stronger acids than acetic acid found in vinegar and also they call for boiling the syrup for some time.

Such formulas always seem to want you to use apple cider vinegar.  This will have a very small amount of minerals not found in distilled vinegar.  I can not imagine the amount of minerals is sufficient to cause any positive or negative health consequences.  The "mother" found often in apple cider vinegar is a type of insoluble cellulosic gum fiber produced by acetobacter to protect the bacteria from the acidity.  It is not digestible so is at most simply fiber in the bees diet. The bacteria in the mother may, or may not be digestible by honey bees.  I do not know.  But, they amount to such a tiny amount I have a hard time seeing them as being important.  They also are the wrong species of bacteria to live in a bees gut and perform any needed functions in the gut.   As fiber has never been shown to be needed by bees I find it hard to think it is of any benefit at all.  My suggestion is use the cheapest vinegar you can find. Or just use water.

I am not even convinced an inverted sugar is more digestible by bees than sucrose.  I know of no data to support that idea.  Bees main reason to invert sucrose, which is the main sugar found in many nectar sources, is so the syrup can be stored at a much higher solids content which is sufficient to stop fermentation by bacteria or yeasts.  Still, natural honeys do contain some residual sucrose that failed to invert and this does not harm bees.  It seems clear that summer bees can eat sucrose and metabolize it just fine without ever storing it for the amount of time needed to cause inversion.

Dick

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