Hi All
 
Just a word of caution when considering feeding bees sugar syrup.
 
I recently had this idea where I figured I would set up a comb
factory, with ten hives on constant feed set to draw comb. It worked
fine for about two weeks and then began to fizzle out with the bees
not drawing comb anymore at all. I suspect that they used up some
supply of another compound probably harvested from flowers and needed
in wax production.
 
Nevertheless they began to really use a lot of sugar. One morning I
was standing and watched their flight paths outside the hive and
noticed that a large number of 'drops' were falling from the bees.
This is normal to see on flight paths and is probably often due to
bees colliding and 'droping their load' and so on, but in this case
is was much worse and I suspect the bees were now unable to proccess
this sugar further and were removing it from the hive, as they do
water that accumulates at the bottom sometimes. They just drink it up
and spit it out a few meters away from the hives.
 
With any enzyme system there is often a need for co-factors and
special trace elements to make up the active sites in the enzyme
structure. I know nothing about the structure of bee invertase's, but
am sure that sugar feeding over prolonged periods leads to the bees
becoming run down and probably to the invertase becoming less
effective to the point where bees would drink the nectar, be unable
to do anything with it and eventually be forced to leave the hive and
dump it.
 
Keep well
 
Garth
 
Garth Cambray           Camdini Apiaries
Grahamstown             Apis mellifera capensis
Eastern Cape Prov.
South Africa
 
Time = Honey
 
After careful consideration, I have decided that if I am ever a V.I.P
the I. may not stand for important.
(rather influential, ignorant, idiotic, intelectual, illadvised etc)