How hot & how long.
 
 
 
 
 
 
At 04:58 AM 10/25/96 GMT, you wrote:
>AD>> >David Eyre and others responded to my description of feeding
>  >> >cooked honey back to my bees with warnings of bad results.
>  >> >I have not experienced any trouble with this.  Perhaps I've
>  >> >just been lucky or the quantities are too small do harm.
>
>No it's really not luck, you just have not heated the honey hot enough
>or for a long enough time. If you do it right it should kill the hive in
>a few hours after they eat it, takes longer if you don't.<G>
>
>AD>Yup.  Bees are amazingly resilient, and canwithstand most of the help we
>  >give them (am I starting to sound like Andy here?)
>
>True on both accounts.
>
>I have stayed out of this discussion mainly because in the last two
>seasons with the value of honey what it is I can't see anyway anyone
>could afford to feed honey to bees. But if they must I can report
>that in my own experience during one season when the price of a load of
>sugar got higher then the cost of the tanker trucks that haul it I
>turned to honey as a sugar substitute to feed my bees and it was no
>better then feeding sugar....
>
>That spring I purchased 2 containers of honey in nice closed top shinny
>red drums from WESTCO or what ever the name of the Western Australia
>Honey marketing group is called. (They now have a WEB page if anyone
>wants to drop in on them.)
>
>I had a choice of honey and took delivery of some very nice light amber
>or extra light amber grade of honey, as I was hoping it would have some
>pollen in it and really did not care what the color grade was. It was
>not eucalyptus honey. The honey was beautiful, every drum was the same,
>NO JUNK, and when I need to use the honey I warmed the honey over night
>in a hot room with radiant heating in the floor and used air to blow it
>out into my 600 gallon mixing and canning tank and drugs were
>incorporated into the honey and water could be added if necessary. It was
>then pumped into 4 one gallons cans at a time and taken out to the bees
>to be put on the hives upside down on the beehive tops which have a hole
>the size of the neck of the can. The lid of the can has one or more
>holes of the size that will only allow the bees to take the feed down at
>the rate of two or three pounds per day for maximum stimulation.
>
>I had no problem using the honey in place of sugar syrup, had no new
>disease problems, or any signs of any digestive problems in the bees
>which we seldom have here in California because of the mild winters
>allowing the bees to get out and do it on the wing and not in the hive.
>I must admit that sometimes they don't get that far away from the hive
>and the costal blue gum flow (eucalyptus) is famous for spotting the
>hives, the truck, and sadly the neighbors wash, cars, and freshly
>painted houses. More then one beekeeper has paid a price for having his
>bees to close to civilization during the blue gum flow.
>
>Anyway as I said I had not problem feeding honey in place of sugar, BUT
>I was disappointed because I was certain there would be some measurable
>benefit or at the least something I could see and there was NONE and
>that was with feeding hives as much as 5 gallons of honey in season.
>
>I did have a problem with those nice red drums which were lithographed
>with the logo of the Australian honey packer when I used them for a
>nice crop of Wild Buckwheat two years later and exported it to Europe.
>The buyer was sure he had been taken and tried to get a refund saying
>that he had found eucalyptus pollen in the honey. At the time I was into
>pollen collecting and did a lot of low power looking to identify pollens
>and other junk in honey and as when the buyer found out who produced the
>honey not another word was ever said. The original Australian honey had
>little pollen in it and what little it had was from some kind of mint
>and maybe some pollen that looked like pine, but no eucalyptus as I
>spend a lot of time looking at samples when it first arrived for the fun
>of it. All my Wild Buckwheat honey had good amounts of buckwheat pollen
>in it as it this area the buckwheat produces a large amount of very nice
>pollen and sometimes the bees will even fill half full frames of
>buckwheat pollen with honey, especially if the hives have a few extra
>entrances as most of mine do.<G>
>                                  ttul, OLd Drone
>
>(c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document
>in electronic form, or to print for personal use.
>(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk.
>---
> ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ "Where there is honey, there are beekeepers"
>
>
Steven Albritton
LDS Communications, Sports America, Chavin Honey Farms
Monroe, Louisiana