>On Tue 4 Oct 1994, Paul van Westendorp  <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>
>---[cut]
>>    honeydew stems from its "exotic" origin rather than the quality of the
>>    product.  If your 20 drums of 85 mm honey is of high quality, it is more
>>    likely that your bees accessed a floral source.
>
 
   In Northern California we regularly tried to get honeydew in the fall.
As I recall, the sweetness in aphid secretions, etc. are nearly due to
glucose, a substance honey bees show little interest in.  (In an ancient
copy of ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping I once read, "Do not try to feed glucose
to bees; glucose is death to bees!"  If one has bees visiting a feeding
dish containing sucrose solution and then suddenly switches to a glucose
solution, foraging may cease.)  At times it was frustrating to find the
leaves on trees and vegetation on the ground glassy smooth with a coating
of honeydew from the insects in the trees above and find honey bees from
nearby colonies ignoring this abundant sugar source.  To counter that
problem, we tried to move colonies into an area BEFORE the honeydew became
abundant (a bit risky, in case the honeydew never materialized), because
hives would then gradually switch over to honeydew as other sources dried
up.  Honeydew honey can be recognized fairly readily by its "stringiness"
(cohesiveness) compared to regular honey -- extracting can then be fairly
tedious.
 
                                                Adrian
 
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